A brief introduction to Typisch Touristik Cloud Platform

A bit about Typisch Touristik?

With Typisch Touristik you rely on the right partner to flexibly, cheaply and modernly manage your own travel services online. It’s core competency is to provide software solutions for group and individual tour operators, holiday home managers and online travel agencies. In addition, they support high-performance and scalable operation of your IT infrastructure.

Some Concepts:

Mid/Back-office: The Back Office or Mid Office is the centralized system for the operational work. From there the travel agency will manage its Suppliers (Amadeus, Galileo, Sabre, Hotelbeds, Tourico, Viator etc), Bookings, Tags, Files, Payments, Invoices, Travels, Accommodations, etc.
IBE: An Internet Booking Engine (IBE) links your reservation system with the Internet to create an online booking system. Make your products bookable online — our Internet Booking Engine makes your products available online in your existing website layout.

Typisch Touristik Cloud Platform

Typisch Touristik Cloud Platform is an online distributed SaaS Application for Tour Agencies, Tour Operators, Home Owners, Travel Guides and many other service providers. Currently the platform hosts hundreds of customers of all over the globe that are constantly and concurrently using this platform online. The biggest advantage of this platform is that offers a complete suite of services so that Tour Operators can configure their complete business online and make it bookable to the world with just a few clicks. Online HTML Content editing tools, booking and payment forms, high security, file uploads, billing and print templates, among other services are the features that can be found in the app. Under the simple structuring “Manage and Display” the Typisch Touristik GmbH offers both the management software Typisch Touristik Cloud and a modern Internet Booking Engine so that customers can have their own website and services available to be booked and requested by any user out there in just a few edits.

Codegenio to the rescue!!!

The cooperation started initially by our Team Leader Victor Barzana back in 2015 when he started working part time with Typisch Touristik CEO Mr. Simon Milz. With the time Typisch Touristik Platform (TYTO Cloud hereinafter) started growing it’s customer base, therefore, the number of tasks also grew exponentially. As more implementation effort was needed, we brought Codegenio Team in.

The role of Codegenio Team in TYTO has been to outsource the complete development of TYTO Cloud by having the work of one split into a complete Team of Software Engineers. This way more features can be implemented multiplying man hours to achieve the best performance and implementation time, so in the end we can have more happy customers.

There is already a guide how Typisch Touristik Cloud was scaled so that it can support more online users and hundreds of thousands of requests per second, please read more about our approach here.

Why TYTO Cloud

There are many tourism software solutions online that may offer you either a Midoffice, or an IBE, or both, but what made TYTO a Cloud was exactly the fact that TYTO was the first company in scaling the Mid/Backoffice/IBE to a big number clients.
The aim of TYTO Cloud is to provide a Backend application that would allow to all it’s customers to login and configure the Travels, Accommodations, Suppliers, Services, VacationRentals, Users, as well as the complete IBE with it’s domains, colors, styles, and a brand new HTML IBE builder + Editor that would allow you to create rich content so that every customer could configure his IBE.

See below some advantages that TYTO Cloud has unlike Trivago, Travelogic, Airbnb:

• REST API that allows any platform out there to use our services.
• WordPress PlugIn that integrates to our API, so customers with an already existing WordPress website can easily integrate it to our Midoffice app. See for example:
• Customer Bergedorfer Shchiffahrtslinie that has a huge amount of amazing Ship travels and dates listed and completely managed in our platform. Their WordPress IBE can be found on this link: https://www.barkassenfahrt.de/rundfahrten/brunchfahrten/
  Bergedorfer currently has an average of at worst 5 bookings per hour.

• Customer African Dream Travel is one of the biggest competitors offering luxury travels for German customers to Africa https://www.african-dreamtravel.de/

However, WordPress is not the only plugin that we have, TYTO already has a completely customizable IBE (by default) to all our customers that allows them to setup a complete website with just one click and one domain configuration.

The default IBE (Responsive)
This IBE is an angular application available for everyone and can be completely customized by TYTO Cloud Customers. This IBE is an entry point to list, filter, calculate prices, book and pay online with just a few settings for every customer of the platform. Which makes it easy to use, and fast for new clients to get to the market. This IBE can also be embedded as an iframe (with the list of bookable services) in customers websites without the need to exactly use the complete IBE.

However, if the customer does not have a website, he only needs to buy a domain name and we integrate it automatically to our system, associate our IBE Application with the new customer domain, add the client settings in our Midoffice, and “Done”.

Please see below a few screenshots of one of our customers using our default IBE:
Link: https://www.sunnydream.us/en

The customer can also use the Backend module “Website-Builder” to completely edit the look and feel of the IBE and add new pages on demand, as well as edit the menu links:
Here we have to give all credits to our core Engineer, @Marcos González for making this feature available for all customers where they can see the changes reflected in the IBE website with just one click.

But wait, does this mean that the TYTO Cloud has to be available to n*n customers concurrently?

Yes, TYTO Cloud is a very active platform with thousands of requests per second, this means that our platform needs to be setup with 0 downtime, with a vertically scalable architecture, so that we can handle all our customers and their customers requests, which becomes an n*n connected users concurrently. If you wish to know how do we solve this problem you may want to read about it at Heroku statelessness and runtime principles that must be kept into consideration while implementing a platform like TYTO Cloud.

Developing for tourism world is a constant challenge

Most of the Software Engineers that have dealt at some point in our careers with Tourism software we know that the tourism world is quite exciting, but at the same time with very complicated rules. One of the hardest headaches you will get when implementing tourism logic is Prices Calculation, Contingent and Services Availability.

At Typisch Touristik one of the biggest challenges we currently face is calculating prices, especially because we have many customers and each one of them wants to have a different way to calculate prices, this is often thoughtful. However, we solve all these problems by introducing different types of stack-able pricing rules sorted by priority. For example, if you book a travel with a discount, you can’t calculate the booking fee (which is a pricing rule) until you calculate the discount fee which reduces the total price. But the discount fee may be applicable only for children from the age of 2 to 7 (configurable) during a certain interval of time. And the most funny part is that some bookings could be made with clashing pricing rules for different intervals of time. For example, someone is traveling to Spain and is booking a travel that has different accommodations that can be booked from August to December, however, the customer may have two pricing rules, Summer and Autumn, where Summer pricing rule apply only until end of August and Autumn would start then. In this case the customer is booking an accommodation that falls within two pricing rules, therefore, our system can not just calculate one service, but has to calculate two different bookings, one from beginning of August until end of August and one from end of August until December (with a different price). The problem with this is that you can’t book a same service with multiple prices because you pay once for every service.

Challenges like this are quite hard to resolve, but with clear and readable code, clear architecture and most of all “clear business rules and requirements” our Team is dealing with challenges like this every day.

Conclusions

TYTO Cloud has been undoubtedly our biggest challenge so far, here we have learned how to deal with millions of records, how to create extremely big migrations, how to handle big data, how to store test data and be confidential with all our customers, how to minify and uglify code and optimize for Production environments. How to test new features in a sandbox environment, and most of all, the biggest challenge is yet to come, keep up maintaining and implementing new features for this amazing platform that keeps growing Typisch Touristik sure is IMHO one of the biggest tourism competitors nowadays in the market. If you are planning to have your own travel platform in just a few hours up and running don’t hesitate to contact directly with Codegenio Founder Victor Barzana or with Typisch Touristik CEO Simon Milz and get a quote and a demo presentation of the TYTO Cloud platform.

Midoffice, Backoffice, Schmetterling integration plus Bookings and Payments API to be continued in the part 2 of this article coming soon…

This article was originally posted by me at codegenio.