Award-winning Travel Portal

Description

  • Modernize a Travel Portal for a Global Services Company

Business Needs

  • Scalability
  • Dependable infrastructure in order to meet SLA agreements
  • Customization for corporate clients
  • Multilingual environment
  • Web 2.0 feature availability

Software

  • IBM WebSphere Portal
  • Lotus Web Content Management

BUSINESS PROBLEM

This global financial services company wanted to update the Portal for their strategic travel division in order to differentiate themselves from other travel services, improve end user experience, minimize development costs, and further establish their leadership position in the industry. 

SOLUTION

This Travel Portal was awarded the Best End-user Solution Award by IBM in 2010.The company envisioned a Portal solution that would serve as a gateway to all travel-related applications as well as other products and services they offered. They also wanted to provide self-service capabilities to reduce the on-boarding time for new customers.

Prolifics — holding several pivotal roles in the project including requirements gathering, architecture and design, project management, UI design, technical lead, content management development, portal development, and administration — used IBM WebSphere Portal and Lotus Web Content Management (WCM) as the foundation to this B2B Portal. These products offered a comprehensive solution encompassing the functionality, collaboration, and Web 2.0 features the company was looking for. WebSphere Portal, the market leader in portal software, provided the dependable infrastructure that ensured the company would be able to meet current service level agreements.

The Portal provides the traveler with a personalized and customized experience that can include portlets for reservations, itinerary management, weather, and travel advisories. With a library of customized themes and skins, as well as prebuilt functional and content portlets, the company’s representatives can create a unique site for a new corporate customer without involving their IT department. The Portal also offers a centralized repository which will store a traveler’s profile and preferences, such as car rental membership information. The site leverages Web 2.0 technology, such as AJAX, to create a nice user experience and Web Content Management for the creation of taxonomy, hierarchy of content and multilingual support (character sets, headings, etc). The portal also enables 3rd party integration with companies like TRX and GTX airline travel systems and wholesale discount rates for hotels.

With the new solution, the amount of effort needed to maintain the Portal was drastically reduced. The company’s business analysts and development teams are now able to implement unique travel sites in approximately 30% of the time previously required.

Building on their initial success, this Travel Portal is being extended to mobile portal devices and will soon include social networking elements — travel communities, blogs, and more - using Lotus Connections.