CASE STUDIES \ PRIME TRAVELS

PRIME TRAVELS

Prime Travels is India's leading travel company that offers a complete range of international travel services. With a flourishing business and vast industry experience, the company promises some of the best travel services to customers, within and outside India.

The explosive growth of Internet as a medium of providing worldwide services, instigated Prime Travels, to use this technology as an extension of its expansion strategy - hence the emergence of PrimeTravels.com.

As a leading provider of travel services, Prime Travels was looking to extend its operations online. The idea was to be continuously available and allow customers a value-added experience in terms of online access, information, and transactions. In other words, Prime Travels wanted a vertical portal, with the functionality to book airline and railway reservations along with advanced search capabilities to look for feasible travel alternates such as hotels, airlines & railway reservations, cruises, and car rental services.

The vortal would serve as an integrated e-commerce solution providing information about various travel packages, tariff rates, and new deals along with online transaction processing capabilities.

Prime Travels planned their online presence in a phased manner. We realized that primetravels.com was an implementation of the company's strategy to provide value-added services to customers. The unique selling factor in this case was a highly comprehensive vortal, with a feature-rich and easy to use interface, in addition to high-end security for online payments.

Initially, the vortal was developed using Java technology with a basic version of CRS powered by Amadeus. This CRS did not allow customers to make online reservations, instead only allowing searching seat availability with airline published fares. There were tools such as the currency converter, passport guidelines, weather information, and visa guidelines. For customers, the member registration functionality was developed along with an advanced search facility to look for travel destinations and tour packages. However, this was just the first phase.

Phase II involved the implementation of a fully functional CRS (powered by Abacus) with live seat availability and reservations search features. This version also allowed Prime Travels to enter their negotiated fare prices to the system. However, Prime Travels required further enhancements to the features and functionality of the vortal and therefore required another overhaul of the vortal. Since then, there have been major revamps to keep the vortal upbeat in terms of performance and technology. As part of the Phase III implementation, the CRS was upgraded to the XML version of Abacus. The vortal provides the facility to book airline reservations through Abacus and make online payments through the ICICI payment gateway. In all, primetravels.com has always been a scalable setup with automated and process-driven functionality.

The latest architecture is a complex multi-tier setup developed using ASP 3.0 on the front-end and SQL Server 2000 on the backend. Abacus is the middle layer responsible for managing real-time online reservation of airline tickets.

The system automatically generates the PNR number, which the customer can view through primetravels.com. Ensuring secure online transactions has always been the top priority, and thereby the vortal authenticates protection through VeriSign. The ICICI online payment gateway has been integrated with primetravels.com for secure and faster online payment processing. The vortal also provides a Java-based chat facility, using which customers can get in touch with the PrimeTravels.com helpdesk and receive instant responses to their queries.

Apart from this, travelers can search for various destinations, tour packages, hotels, and economical deals offered by prime travels. If a customer needs to book a tour, hotel, car rental, or cruise online, they can simply select the tour package or destination of choice, book the deal and make payments online.