Development of a flexible booking system and link-up of accounting and payment systems
airberlin holidays GmbH was founded in 2008 out of a cooperation between the former German airline Air Berlin and Karlheinz Kögel, the founder of l’tur and inventor of last-minute travel. The limited company had specialised in the dynamic packaging of holiday trips with Air Berlin flights. Customers benefited from the cheaper flights offered by this cooperation and the lean production structures of airberlin holidays.
Grothe Technology has been supporting airberlin Holidays already since 2011. Our first challenge was to develop a booking system with a dynamic packaging platform. We achieved this with flying colours and were thus able to secure a firm place at the side of the former tour operator and travel agency.
„Grothe Technology developed the central booking system for our dynamic production, created an interface to SAP financial accounting and advised us on PCI certification, thereby making a significant contribution to the success of our rapidly growing airline holidays business.“
Our software development in detail
After a detailed analysis of the individual requirements of airberlin holidays, Grothe Technology designed the booking system with a dynamic packaging platform as well as interfaces to numerous flight and hotel providers and a back-office connection. The system we developed was flexibly expandable, so that in the course of time more and more tourism service providers could be linked up – e.g. insurance companies and car rental companies.
In addition to an XML interface for booking on the web, we have also implemented a module for booking trips in the travel agency using the amadeus TOMA standard. Later, SAP-based accounting was introduced with the company Travel-ba.sys. For this purpose, we developed the processing of upstream accounting and connected the accounting system. In addition, we implemented a connection to Concardis digital payment systems and provided advise on the PCI certification.
Conclusion
Following the insolvency of Air Berlin, airberlin holidays had to ‘switch horses’ and, under the name airline holidays, marketed package tours with other airlines such as Eurowings, Condor, and TUIfly. As the booking system we developed was designed to be extremely flexible and easily expandable from the outset, it could be adapted to the changed conditions without any problems, thus contributing to the success of the company.
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