Travix International BV, the largest online travel company in the Netherlands, manages an extensive portfolio of travel-focused websites operating under the brand names CheapTickets, BudgetAir, Vayama, Vliegwinkel and Flugladen.
Travix is active in over 25 countries and employs approximately 450 people. With annual sales of approximately $2 billion (USD), Travix has over 50 million unique Website visitors and four million transacting customers per year.
Travix strives be the “Best in Flights” and the preferred partner of travelers worldwide. To stay ahead of the competition, the company must continually reinvent itself by adding consumer choices, expanding its services and developing and implementing the newest IT solutions. By leveraging the expertise of technology partners such as Skyscanner, Google, Facebook, Amadeus and InRule Technology, Travix is able to provide its customers with an exceptional user experience that differentiates it from the competition.
Project Overview
In addition to its role as an online travel agency, Travix is also an airfare aggregator, pulling together flight and pricing options from numerous airline partners and presenting them in a “flight panel” grid that makes it easy for consumers to review options and make a selection. Complex rules surround various business decisions in flight panel selection, including route, airline partner and other considerations. Changes proved to be cumbersome for Travix’s business users as they struggled to implement models quickly that would maximize profitability.
InRule® at Travix
Travix deployed InRule to replace static rules for flight selection, route, and certain calculations with rule engine calls. InRule provides Travix’s business users with transparency into the rules that are in use and allows them to quickly assess modifications that must be made to the logic in order to maximize profitability.
Rigorous Testing and Fast Development
“To prove the highest risk and speed within our situation, right from the beginning we chose to test high volume big datasets,” said Ide Koops, Delivery Manager at Travix International. “We used high volume searches, more than five million per day, with large, 2MB datasets, all new to InRule. Performance exceeded our expectations, after some help from the InRule ROAD services team, and we felt confident to roll it out across all of our brands.”
Implementation
Working together, the business users and developers were able to expedite the deployment of the enhanced system. Within three weeks, business users had implemented the majority of their commission contracts and fully implemented fare rules for their largest market.
The soft launch on the first site was completed after four months of development, and the full roll-out to all sites was completed only ten months after development started.
Next Steps
As Travix now uses InRule across all its brands for the pricing of fares, the company is now turning to adding more functionality in the areas of fares and fare searches, specifically related to search dispatching, filtering, and deduplication.
In addition, Travix is looking into leveraging InRule as part of the checkout process, as well as bringing the technology into additional products, services and payment rules.
“InRule is a complete set of tools that allows us to translate complex rule models in to a working system… For developers it is flexible enough to develop special requests in our existing software as well as on the tools provided by InRule. I had a great experience with the service of InRule Technology. They were able to help us in many ways, from training to optimizing our rules.”
Developer,
Travix
