Mike Bench Agency partnered with Datawalls to rebuild their core real estate software: step up with the online customer service, buy, sell, rent, finance, and learn about real estate.
Person/months
Months
Challenge
In real estate, a “day at the office” isn’t exactly a day at the office. One of the most exciting aspects of the real estate profession is the variety you will find from one day to the next and the independence that goes along with it.
Buying or selling a home is often the single biggest financial decision people make and your role and responsibility as a real estate professional is to help them navigate this critical moment in their lives.
Experienced in end-to-end custom software development, Datawalls stepped in to address the outlined challenges and help Mike regain their competitive strength.
Solution
To understand the full scope of the project, Datawalls started with an in-depth analysis of the legacy solution’s architecture and code. The analysis showed that the current solution’s logic was too complex and couldn’t enable the required level of functional flexibility. Datawalls offered to rebuild the solution according to the service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles. The SOA-based software solutions have multiple advantages over monolithic apps, particularly in terms of customization, security, and management capabilities, which are critical characteristics Expedia was looking for.
The solution’s code review showed various issues affecting the operation of the existing templates and made their further transformation problematic. That’s why Datawalls’s development team rewrote a substantial part of the legacy code to eliminate the revealed flaws and prepare a reliable basis for new templates.
The rebuilt solution now includes two essential parts:
- Customizable internal-facing portal for partners
- Customer-facing web portal for consumers
As two parts fulfill different functions, each of them got an individual design and feature set.
The internal portal provides flexible templates for brands to customize them according to their service specifics: accommodation booking, flights, events, car rental, etc. Brands have a wide choice of features to demonstrate and promote their offering by adopting ready-to-use features from Expedia’s templates or by seamlessly integrating their solutions with the Expedia platform.
- Diversified content management features
- Geolocation features
- Advertising capabilities (including promoted content, dynamic ads, sales, discounts, and rewards)
- Booking modules with customizable parameters
- Integration with payment service providers
- Built-in rating features
- Customer feedback forms
- Interactive maps and location schemes
- Integration of ready-made websites and portals with the Expedia platform via RESTful API
- Ongoing brand support provided by a professional technical and account management team
Apart from the core features, all partners also have access to the portal analytics module. This new functionality enabled brand representatives to get the stats on their services, track customer activities, assess the effectiveness of ads campaigns and bonus programs, and timely reveal unpopular offerings to replace them with better deals.
Results
Despite the overall complexity of the project dictated by the wide scope of tasks and collaboration with geographically distributed teams, Datawalls delivered the revamped tour booking software in under a year. Within the project, Datawalls’s team helped the Customer achieve a number of critical goals:
- Improving the solution’s architecture along with ensuring its better customization flexibility, improved performance, and stronger security.
- Redesigning legacy templates to make the portal more appealing to end users and partners.
- Setting up a uniform booking process across different services.
- Replacing the rigid features of legacy templates with customizable modular functionality.
- Enhancing the solution’s overall performance, particularly the templates’ loading time.
- Setting up the process of a smooth migration from legacy to redesigned templates.
- Ensuring the solution’s scalability and ability to provide over 10,000 brands with the required functionality.
- Guaranteeing a consistent user experience of both the desktop and mobile applications.
WANT TO START A PROJECT?
It’s simple!
By submitting this form i give my consent for Datawalls to process my personal data
pursuant to Datawalls privacy and Cookies Policy.
Datawalls helped Expedia revamp their international travel booking software in order to offer their partners wider capabilities to promote their services and improve the overall customer experience.
