Holiday search and booking platform for a travel agency

Context

The travel agency sells package holidays: Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Spain and a dozen or so other destinations. The agency does not put the holidays together itself. Tour operators offer flights, hotels and board as packages, and the agency picks out what is genuinely worth attention and helps the client avoid a bad choice.

So the website had to show real prices and dates that change every day, while clearly presenting the agency's opinion of each hotel, because that opinion is exactly why people come to it.

What needed solving

The catalogue currently holds almost 400 offers. Entering them by hand and correcting prices every day is impossible. On the other hand, if the website only repeats the tour operator's catalogue, it is no different from ten others.

What happens after an enquiry also needed sorting out. Clients often want to compare several options, and holidays are rarely paid for at once: there is a deposit, a balance, sometimes instalments. All of this has to be in one place, not in an agent's inbox.

How the system is organised

Prices and dates come from tour operators. The hotel page shows a calendar with prices by day, and visitors can choose the number of travellers, nights, board type and departure city. Once a date is selected, the price is updated immediately, and each option shows the flight, room and whether instalments are available.

The agency's opinion of the hotel. The agent writes her own comment, pros and cons, and hotels are tagged: "Favourites", "VIP hotel", "Economy". Sometimes the page says openly that a hotel does not pass the agency's selection. On the home page, the same tags are used to build curated selections: for families, adults only, VIP holidays, women travelling together.

Search by travel need. Search works by airport, destination, date, travellers and duration. Results can be filtered by country, hotel, price per person, star rating and board. Separate sections for last-minute deals and school holidays open the search with dates already selected.

An enquiry for the undecided. The form asks for the type of trip, the destination or a specific hotel, date flexibility, duration, travellers, board and budget. From this the agent prepares a quote, and the client can receive several options to compare.

Bookings and payments in the system. Once a quote is accepted, a booking is created and linked to the original enquiry. The booking holds the travellers, flights, hotel, payment schedule and correspondence, so it is clear what has been paid and which deadlines are approaching.

Worth knowing

Holiday prices change constantly. That is why the website always shows a "from" price and warns that the final price is confirmed at booking. This is fair to the client and protects the agency from disputes over a price that changed overnight.