Scalable and Efficient Hotel Booking Platform
Hotel search is an essential feature of the Ascenda Loyalty hotel booking system that needs efficient processing to attract and retain customers to use their booking platforms. There are at least 3 hotel suppliers to be integrated, and each supplier has its own processing delays when collating the pricing information. There are also spikes in usage, and the platform needs to handle the load flexibly. If not handled properly, these design challenges may be costly to the company in terms of loss in conversions and revenue when the customer experiences slowness to loading and using other platforms.
Their Goal: Develop a prototype which would provide a good customer usage experience in hotel search.
Project Objectives
1. Optimise the speed and accuracy of the hotel search results.
2. Optimise the application and services used to scale our traffic flexibly.
3. Secure the application design
4. Automate the system integration and deployment
Student consultants worked closely with Ascenda Loyalty representatives to devise the following for the prototype they developed
1. Understand how the search data are provided by actual suppliers in terms of destination and actual hotel room results.
2. Understand how the hotel booking is being processed, including payment.
3. Design and prototype the application codes to integrate with the API calls provided by the bank and loyalty programs.
4. Design and develop the software qualities of the platform required by the sponsor.
Outcomes
1. Students can work on real-world technical issues, identify and translate industry sponsor needs into system requirements. They are required to identify suitable technologies and solutions, balance the technical and business trade-offs, and realize a practical system.
2. Students explore the usage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) essential services and software development best practices to design the prototype to address critical design challenges.
3. Provide business benefits to customers in efficient hotel search using effective caching mechanisms.
4. Provide business benefits to both company and customers in scalable design that can handle spikes to maintain consistent browsing experiences.
5. Provide business benefits to customers with a secure design that confidentially handles their personal data.
6. Provide technical benefits to the company in automated feature deployment to increase productivity and reduce human errors. Application features that are manually tested and deployed take hours and can be reduced to minutes.
7. The sponsor can further explore the prototype solution with the GitHub source code provided.
"This project is designed to provide students with experience on design and implementing a realistic loyalty industry platform. The students need to take into consideration various factors such as security, performance (both client side and server side), extensibility and user experience. The students are expected to explore what technologies they can combine and use to deliver the best experience to the customers and demonstrate it with a fully implemented solution." - Ascenda Loyalty representative