A Mobile Application for a Booking Platform: Travel with Ease and Comfort

Travelling has become an integral part of human essence, a loop to get a deep breath of fresh air as well as to enrich their spiritual world and creative thinking. A wide range of modern innovative technologies and services are called to facilitate and streamline the process of a person’s being away from home in myriad ways. Every traveler decides on heading somewhere striving for a very comfortable, free of stress and individually friendly full-cycle organization. Booking services are the ones to guarantee all the possible services on the issue. 

Since August 2018, our team has been developing a mobile application for a booking platform to manage short-stay rentals. This project involves the development of a scalable application that allows the user to get access to a variety of services related to hotels, such as booking, quick check-out, ordering services, payment automation, and much more. That is a project where you can find a hotel, book a room as well as room service, make a payment, open an appartment door just using the given mobile application.

PROJECT CHALLENGES

The core idea was to create a highly competitive and scalable project to win recognition and a good reputation on the market of booking services. It is the project that tries to automate the hotel reservation process, meaning you can do it without a hotel reception. Consequently, our full-stack team had several products to develop simultaneously, such as: 

– Terminal – a device that stands in the lobby of the hotel and allows you to make check-in/check-out payments without the participation of the hotel administration;  

– TV OS app – an application installed on the TV in the guest room that allows you to order food, call cleaners, book tables, read news, etc. 

– Android/iOS application – an application allowing the user to find a hotel, book a room, make check-in and check-out, open the door using your phone, read hotel news, order food in the room, write to chat admins, etc.  

– Back office – admin with the help of administration can adjust everything that will be visible in the app (prices, discounts available, gallery, chat with the guests, and even more).

SOLUTIONS

To meet all the challenges mentioned, both front end and back end developing techniques were used by our full-stack developers’ team:  

Backend: Ruby, Postgres, multitenancy (apartment gem), sidekiq, redis, rspec, different apis (pms apis, payment apis etc.), json/xml/soap. 

Frontend: React Native, React, React-native-web, Redux, React-Router. 

The techniques mentioned above contributed to the following two key development processes: 

• integration of the outside API in the project (pms, payment systems etc.);  

• implementation of new features – a system of coupons, tickets, payment methods, etc. 

VALUE DELIVERED

Besides a wide functionality scope, the project builds a strong name for the client’s brand by making it twofold and serving both the users and the hotels. The application under discussion is integrated into the very PMS (Property Management System) of the hotel demanding no changes and no additional modifications but providing access to the system only. Booking process overall facilitation, multitasking and flexibility are those unconditional advantages the project grants to its users.