Loyalty Solution for Major Online Travel Agency

The Customer

The Company a premier Online Travel Agency serving millions of consumers through a number of localized travel brands and providing access to one of the broadest selections of travel products and services in North America, Europe and Asia. The Company provides innovative research, planning and booking tools to meet a comprehensive set of needs across a range of customer segments from families to corporations. Branded sites feature airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rental, cruises, vacation packages, and destination activities.

The Challenge

With over a million servers in data centers around the world and nearly one billion search requests every day, any technology initiative would require not only sophisticated architecture for the solution, but also extensive integration, proven performance and stability. Added to the complexity of integration and the scale of performance requirements, the program itself would need to evolve from an existing partner program, and to offer the consumer a more rewarding and higher value experience than before.

The Solution

EPAM helped to create an integrated services-based solution that allows the Customer to expand or change the program offerings based on business needs. The 12 month effort was staged in order to minimize risk and to ensure smooth integration between all key internal systems including Order Management, Fulfillment, Finance and Enterprise Data Warehouse Reporting systems. At the core of the solution are components developed and provided by EPAM as system accelerators. In utilizing a hybrid component-build approach, EPAM was able to decrease the time to market while focusing on the unique program and integration needs of the Customer.

The Loyalty System supports a flexible range of Program features including:

• Flexible Program rules, setup & administration
• Configurable Earn points (award) functionality
• User membership and profiles
• Independent Offer and User Account services
  

The Offer System is closely integrated with the Loyalty Services and supports:

• Offer Rule Authoring (marketing details and dynamic qualification items)
• Offer presentation and fulfillment
  

The User Account Service supports:

• Stored Value Ledger for user transactions
• Retrieve transaction history
• Support for pending awards

Technologies and Tools

The new system was built on a Java Enterprise platform and leveraged existing Customer platform components including Service bus, Modules activity interface, Messaging codegen, Naming conventions, Logging and Monitoring. EPAM worked with the Customer to utilize best practices for Spring configuration, logging, security and source control. Microsoft SQL and IBM DB2 servers were used for backend storage.
As with all EPAM engineering projects, Continuous Integration and Build release management practices were supported by EPAM's robust internal tools and processes.

The Results

Today's program is more valuable, more flexible and more attractive to consumers than ever before. With new earning and redemption features and the opportunity to tie the program into an improved Offer functionality, the Customer can expand the range of their marketing and promotional capabilities while building value for the brand. On the basis of a flexible and stable platform, the program can be further extended to provide services to the Customer's affiliates as well as a range of global partners.