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STA Travel
Building an integrated e-business solution to sell airline tickets, hotels, rails, packaged tours, insurance and travel gear.
The Client
STA Travel is the world's largest student and youth travel company, servicing
over 70 countries worldwide. STA Travel - USA & Canada offers exclusive
savings for travel air tickets, rail and bus passes, rental cars, hotels,
spring break and other tour packages through their web site. The client wanted
to improve their operational efficiencies as well as enhance their customers'
buying experience through redesign of their web-based travel reservation
process and integration of sales of various travel related products.
The Challenge
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Build an integrated e-Business solution which allows the client to seamlessly
sell airline reservations, car rentals, rail passes, package tours, travel
discount cards, travel gear, travel books and travel insurance over the
Internet. |
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Integrate the backend order fulfillment and accounting system with the online
reservation system. |
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Move to a more stable and robust architecture and infrastructure. |
The Solution
XYKA helped the client define the vision for their business requirements
through a series of "discovery" workshops. Based on the vision, XYKA crafted a
sound technical architecture to help STA realize their business objectives.
XYKA designed and developed an end-to-end solution, which included the
following key features:
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A booking engine that allows end users to search for client
negotiated and published airfares and make reservations on the Sabre Global
Distribution System (GDS) through a web based interface. The process ends with
the generation of a Passenger Name Reference (PNR) for the user and writing the
PNR to the appropriate queue for further processing |
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Capability to book more than 50 different kinds of Rail and Bus
Passes in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and South America |
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Search and book tour packages by Region (Asia, Europe, North
America etc), Activity (Camping, Snorkeling, Safari etc) and Price |
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A robust and flexible shopping cart engine that allows the
client to cross sell other travel related products such as travel gear, books,
travel discount cards and travel insurance along with air tickets, car rentals,
rail passes and packaged tours. The shopping cart application allows
transactions with the end users to be conducted in a secure environment as well
as provides integration with the backend order fulfillment engine |
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A smooth interface with the backend order fulfillment and
accounting system via order specific remark lines in the PNR. The order
fulfillment system was created to read these PNR remark lines and issue tickets
and travel documents and ship non-air items such as travel gear and books to
the end user |
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A Content Management System which allows the client to easily
update their web content including the home page and specials being offered on
the web site |
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Globalization and Internationalized framework - Resource Bundle
and language independent architecture enabling the site to be rendered in
multiple languages |
Technology
.NET Framework, Visual Studio .NET, VB, C#, XML
Sabre GDS, Sabre XML Power Toolkit
SQL Server 2000, Sybase
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