Excerpt.
A case about creating an aggregator with an automatic selection of current offers from the best travel operators. One system – thousands of offers. For different price categories.
At the end of 2019, a Latvian travel company asked us to create an online aggregator where offers from the main Latvian tour operators will be shown on a single website.
Client story.
company is a Latvian tour operator organizing trips to many countries of the world. A wide network of partners allows the company to provide services at a high level and strive to develop new directions.
During the conversation, company representatives told us about their project in the field of tourism.
We were given the following tasks:
- To develop an aggregator that will allow combining travel offers from the 5 largest Latvian travel companies - Teztour, Novatours, etc.
- All offers must be displayed on a single website and have a payment system for placing an order.
This approach helps to achieve the following goals:
- to attract target audience and increase traffic
- to increase sales volume
- to ensure minimal content manager intervention - automatically collected data is simply duplicated on the aggregator pages.
Customers needed an electronic trading platform based on the "all in a single place" principle. The system was supposed to combine offers from several resources with the ability to place an order on an aggregator website.
Our solution.
In this project, we became contractors and followed the concept set by the customer. We created the website design and the programming part, including the data collection robots (parsers).
If the service provider (a tour operator) provided the access to its Web API or valid API libraries, we used them in our work. In other cases, we have created more complex data collection systems.
The result.
Home page
The home page consists of the following sections:
- current directions
- popular offers (Popular products)
- recommended offers at the best price (Best price)
The selection is formed by the administrator.
Users can also enter here the desired dates and the number of people to get suitable offers for their request.
Homepage mockup:
Final result of the home page:
Search
The page contains a search form with the specified filters:
- Place of departure
- Destination
- Date range
- Number of adults and children
- Keyword to search by a hotel name
In the left part, there are additional filters that can be used to select the following parameters:
- Country of departure and destination
- Range of desired prices
- Hotel and room class
- Food type
- Distance to the city, airport, beach, etc.
All data is displayed on the right. Each offer contains a photo, rating, filter matching, and price.
Product
The photos of the selected hotel (with the photo gallery) and detailed information is displayed on the right side. On the left side - detailed booking information according to the search filters. The visitors can either book or buy a tour here.
If users want to learn more or change some data, they can change the date, the type of room, the number of people, or fill in a feedback form and get advice from a travel agent.
Product page mockup:
Final result of the product page:
Text page
A typical text page with an image was created for additional sections. Such pages can be used as a Blog article, News articles and general text pages.
Summary.
During 4 months of work, we managed to create a full-fledged aggregator that collected current offers from tour operator websites. Users no longer spend time visiting different websites and get all the necessary information in a single place.
Current offers and prices allow users to compare several options for the cost of services at once.
The coronavirus pandemic hit hard the tourism industry around the world and, in particular, in Latvia. Therefore, the customer postponed the release dates and took the opportunity to improve the aggregator's functions.
