Website Development for an Ecommerce Software Vendor in the Travel Industry

About the Client

Alturos Destinations is a major software solution provider for travel businesses in the European alpine region. The company supplies local operators—travel agencies, ski resorts, hotels, and transport providers—with a comprehensive set of solutions for managing digital sales and service bookings. Alturos Destinations is an enabler and connector facilitating collaboration and cross-selling among local travel businesses. The company has helped generate over €337 million in turnover for their customers.

Challenge

Over the years, Alturos has built a robust, extendable, and highly customizable ecommerce platform encompassing a host of connected digital services. Their products include:

• customer support tools
• a digital marketing engine
• a host of cross-channel online sales solutions

The company has also created an ever-growing ecosystem of customers who run different modifications of their software on-premises or in the cloud.

The ecommerce platform had many features and custom extensions, developed over time. However, the platform was hosted on outdated architecture which hindered the platform’s performance and limited Alturos’ ability to distribute software to new customers.

As their business grew more complex, Alturos was looking for a technology partner with extensive ecommerce expertise to assist in improving functionality and handling ongoing platform maintenance. The Edvantis software engineering team was hired to assist with the development of new product features, and API programming. 

Solution

Beginning in June 2019, the Edvantis’ specialists augmented the software development and quality assurance processes at Alturos. Agile teams of 4 to 6 Software Engineers supported the development of new product features such as: 

• A new connector for an “experience bank” which is an aggregate pool of hospitality services provided by all operators in the region. Our team built a new connector that allowed new partners to access these offers and resell them to their customers.
• An updated reservation management service that enabled compliance with cancellation requirements imposed by the local regulator. The new feature made it easier to refund customers for a cancelled travel package featuring multiple services, and notify all service providers from a single interface.
• A convenient interface for booking car transportation services in the region.
• A host of API extensions. Our team helped Alturos separate one of its key services–a travel service booking module. Now any customer can easily integrate the booking module into their system.

Results

The Edvantis’ team quickly achieved a strong backlog, handling issues, and aligning with Alturos’ in-house resources. Jointly, we created 10 new ecommerce platform features that had been requested and were positively rated by Alturos’ end customers. 

In addition, we helped improve the performance and maintenance of the core ecommerce platform.