- With the Microsoft cloud, the Spanish company TravelgateX connects suppliers and tour operators in real time, providing key resources to adapt to tourists' new booking habits.
- With the jump to Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS), this critical service is even more flexible to address user demand that, due to the pandemic, is concentrated at very specific times and requires having an extremely precise vision and snapshot of hotel availability.
- TravelgateX already connects more than 1,000 partners in the tourism industry, channels more than 3 billion searches and completes more than 30,000 daily reservations, generating a business of 3.2 billion euros in transactions.
The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected a multitude of sectors, among which tourism stands out. The sector has gone from contributing 14.5% of the national GDP before the pandemic to 4.3% in 2020 and, given the uncertainty derived from continually changing restrictions, the period with which users contract their trips and accommodations has been reduced. has reduced very sharply from the more than 60 days that were common before the pandemic. Currently, up to 40% of trips are booked less than a week in advance. In fact, 20% of total reservations are now made less than a day in advance, also concentrating demand at a time when a relaxation of restrictions is announced.
In a context of transformation of the sector and the need for reinvention, it is more necessary than ever to have agile platforms that provide the client with all the options that fit their searches, including their availability and conditions, in real time. This entails enormous technical complexity, derived from the interconnection of the systems of all the players in the industry - travel rate aggregators, metasearch engines, hotel chains, airlines, etc. - with very low response times or latencies, to avoid that every moment of delay translates into a wait for the customer.
To respond to this need, which, although not new, does require a qualitative leap to successfully face changes in the demand for tourist services, TravelgateX has developed integration through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). These tools, supported by Microsoft Azure, are responsible for interconnecting more than 1,000 partners in the tourism industry, channeling more than 3,000 million searches and completing more than 30,000 daily reservations.
“At TravelgateX we have the needs of our clients in mind and we are committed to working on technology and automation. "We consider it very important to stay up to date with the new technologies that are emerging in order to be competitive both technically and in terms of costs, which is why we have been using Microsoft for a long time, in which we now take innovation one step further," indicates Carlos Tur, CIO of TravelgateX.
Less latency and more availability in the management of tourist reservations
Since its founding, TravelgateX has been a 100% cloud company, using the Microsoft Azure cloud for its rapid scalability and the possibility of deploying its solutions anywhere in the world with the best guarantees in terms of compliance, error tolerance and capacity. Microsoft is the provider with the most regions available worldwide - including the upcoming opening of a data center region in Spain. The geographical proximity of the data centers to the customer allows us to obtain lower latencies, an especially critical aspect for TravelgateX's business, since it directly impacts the user experience of the tourist reservation platforms.
In the words of Óscar Pérez, CTO, “At TravelgateX we work on three interconnected challenges: concurrency, scalability and stability. With our technology, built on Microsoft Azure, we must ensure that our platform is up and running 99.99% of the time. Partners, both Buyers and Sellers, can start using our services in minutes, without wasting time. The simplicity and speed of our APIs allows us to scale and maintain sustained high product availability throughout the year, 24 hours a day.”
The company has now opted for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which allows you to easily deploy and manage containerized applications, uniting development and operations teams on a single platform. With AKS, and the commitment to a microservices architecture, TravelgateX has achieved more flexible and scalable environments to guarantee service to suppliers and customers, as well as an internal unification that simplifies management and maintenance. Thanks to all this, the company has reduced deployment time very significantly, going from days to less than an hour.
TravelgateX has also chosen .NET Core, a high-performance work environment open source for the development of cross-platform applications, which speeds up working with containers. Its use has allowed TravelgateX to improve the performance of its services, which directly translates into a 20% reduction in CPU consumption, which also means a reduction in costs. In addition, the improvement achieved in response times also directly impacts the service provided to the different actors in the value chain and the satisfaction of the end customer.
About TravelgateX
TravelgateX is a B2B online marketplace and its mission is to democratize the travel industry. Any company connected to our network can buy and sell seamlessly with each other, regardless of their size or current technology. With over 1,000 Partners, TravelgateX simplifies connectivity with easy-to-integrate APIs that make searching, comparing and booking travel products in real time a breeze.
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