Migration to JavaScript and SOA for a Web Portal with 400M Subscriptions

Customer

One of the leading independent travel companies in Canada, itravel2000 offers a range of travel products including flights, cruises, vacation packages, insurance and more. Founded in 1994 with the aim to deliver exceptional customer services, the company has since developed into a high-profile click-and-mortar agency with its own online booking application and white label solutions for partner companies like Petro-Canada, among others.

Challenge

As itravel2000 set out to redevelop its online booking platform to align the company’s offering with end customers’ expectations and boost the brand visibility in this highly competitive market, the company was looking for a reliable web application development partner to expand its limited internal resources. With more challenges coming up in the long run, a prospective partner’s technological expertise was a crucial factor. This was where ScienceSoft fell in line, with more than 10 years in .NET development and a track record of web application redesign projects.

Solution

The key mission of the project – migration of itravel2000’s entire solution to a new, state-of-the-art platform – in technical terms was translated into web application redesign that drew on the SPA (single page application) approach, as well as cutting-edge technologies and design patterns.

The core activities also included creating proprietary APIs (one of which was entirely delivered by ScienceSoft’s developers) that are each responsible for particular information requests, like hotel deals, vacation packages, etc., and for checking the relevance of featured deals. Additionally, the team used the ASP.NET Web API framework to build an umbrella web API that covers all the above mentioned specialized APIs and provides a central point of access to data sourced from around the partnership network of itravel2000.

Started in October 2014, the cooperation between ScienceSoft and itravel2000 soon proved to be a long-term commitment. Gradually, the project scope evolved from the initial all-round support, fixing of the business logic issues, and web pages redesign to full-stack development and support covering every component of the Customer’s online booking platform.

A year later, the project team of ScienceSoft’s .NET developers doubled in size and is now an integral part of the Customer’s internal development resources.

Results

With more than 50,000 daily visitors and the all-time subscription base of over 400 mln users from around the globe, itravel2000’s online booking platform is its key customer-facing asset that has to ensure impeccable user experience and uninterrupted performance at all times.

In this major undertaking, the technological partnership, which started rather as probing of ScienceSoft’s capabilities evolved into ongoing, productive cooperation that now drives the digital transformation of Canada’s major travel agency.

At the moment, Feefo – a global provider of genuine customer reviews – rates itravel2000 as ‘Excellent’ at 95% of customer satisfaction.

"I've been happy thus far with the performance that I'm getting from ScienceSoft. Overall, we're very pleased with their contributions. They're reliable."

Dmitry Kazak, Enterprise Architecture Director, itravel2000

Technologies and Tools

Frontend: AngularJS, JavaScript, JQuery, CSS, LESS

Server-side: ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft CMS, Node.js, Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Environment: Microsoft Visual Studio 2012, 2015