Development of a booking system with dynamic packaging platform
Almost 10 years ago, Karlheinz Kögel, the inventor of last-minute travel and founder of l’tur, set up what is now the largest online tour operator for airline holiday offers: HLX Touristik GmbH. It has specialised in the dynamic packaging of package tours as well as selling and distributing these tours online via tourism web portals such as Lufthansa Holidays or Eurowings Holidays. The trick: within only a few hours, HLX combines current airline promotions, such as the Eurowings ‘Sparflugtage’ economy flights or Condor ‘Eintagsfliegen’ flights, with selected hotel deals. As a result, the customer receives holiday offers at bargain prices – for all well-known holiday and city destinations worldwide.
Grothe Technology was brought into the team to ensure that the rapidly growing, complex business model always functions smoothly. Since 2015, we have been able to support HLX with our extensive expertise in travel technology.
„Fast-growing and complex business models require flexible and expandable technologies. For many years now, Grothe Technology has been supporting us in expanding our leading position with brands such as HLX, Lufthansa Holidays and Eurowings Holidays.“
Our software development in detail
Our first task was to design and develop the booking system for HLX. The result: a dynamic packaging platform and interfaces to international cooperation partners such as airlines, hotel providers, transfers, as well as car rental and insurance companies. The booking system we developed offers even more: a back-office connection to SAP and to digital payment providers. Probably the biggest advantages of the system, however, are its flexibility and expandability.
Over the past few years, we have connected more and more tourism service providers to the booking system and implemented comprehensive expansions. The most recent challenge was to implement the new data security standard GDPR.
Example: Lufthansa Holidays and white label brands
Grothe Technology was successfully able to support HLX with some of the best-known airline brands. The brands Lufthansa Holidays and Eurowings Holidays went live on the HLX platform, for example. Travel deals for various white label brands such as Travelzoo and secret escapes are also produced on a separate platform.
„The success of airberlin holidays and HLX has inspired us to launch another major airline holidays production with Lufthansa.
Grothe Technology developed the connection between our central booking system and Lufthansa as well as other partners for our dynamic production and thus contributed significantly to making this extraordinary cooperation venture a success.“
Conclusion
The highly flexible and easily expandable booking system we developed represents the ideal solution for the fast growing, international business model of HLX with its many different partners.
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