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hotel booking platform assembled with Magento

Posted 29 May 2009 by Olivier Pépin in ECOMMERCE

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After few months of hard work, we are happy to announce that www.planigo.de is “Live-and-Booking”.

Currently tested on German travelers, this is the first hotel booking property of QCNS Group (www.qc-ns.com) to be migrated to this new e-commerce/e-booking solution built on Magento Commerce (www.magentocommerce.com). In the coming weeks, more and more properties will be migrated to Magento Commerce, including flagship www.planigo.com - one of Europe's leading hotels booking platform.

This project required a major personalization of the Magento Commerce 1.3.1, featuring more than 60'000 hotels and fully integrated with QCNS Quad booking engine.

The new solution offers numerous functionalities that QCNS required:

• improved real-time prices, integrated with 10 suppliers through QUAD technology
• multi-store/multi-market management
• CMS & marketing flexibility
• layered navigation and filtering by geo-localization (example: http://www.planigo.de/en/hotels/hotels-france/hotels-paris.html)

One of the challenges, visible behind the scene, is for the site to constantly provide the better price and availability on a very volatile and fractioned hotel market. Cache management is ubiquitous, with a progressive move to real-time information the further the client is moving towards the look-to-book process.

At the Magento level, we had to transform and evolve an e-commerce platform into a hotel-booking solution:

• Catalog of over 60’000 SKU (hotels) and 10’000 categories shared across the stores
• Just-in-time product creation upon room availability check in order re-enter the standard check-out process (over 10 million potential SKU waiting)
• 20 Magento modules nicely extended (mainly on the catalog, category management, and multi-language support)
• A lot of work on the API side to allow catalog provisioning from internal systems and integration with order management systems
• Advanced caching strategies (memcached) and performance improvements
• And all that with only 1 single line modified in Magento core

Magento is a very powerful open source e-commerce engine. Extremely few core issues or bugs were encountered to date. Still, Magento code is not to be put in all hands and requires very good object orientation and engineering skills. Some may qualify it as "over-engineered" or over-complicated, but in the end, the proof is there that you can transform Magento into a complex hotel-booking solution in less than 4 months.

This solution will allow QCNS to offer one of the most attractive offering on the market, and probably help them reach the next level in their growth plan.

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