Accommodation booking system – Groups AG

The platform enables searching and booking group accommodations.

The Client

Groups AG is the market leader for booking of group accommodations in Switzerland. As a family business with 40 years of experience, Groups specialises in finding accommodation for group guests. The booking platform previously operated by Groups AG required a total replacement. It was aimed to be replaced with the new, state-of-the-art proprietary one – www.groups.swiss.

Name

Groups AG

From

Switzerland

Challenge

The replacement project included the digitization of the company’s internal operational processes and a domain change. Strategic priorities included the search functionality, the accommodation presentation and the inquiry issuance for the organizers of group trips – in four languages. Equally important was the high performance on all kinds of user devices and the SEO requirements. The hosts should also get a simple to use and the self-explanatory admin area to maintain their data, including validations. And the Group’s AG employees to have an admin area to support and interact with its clients and maintain the platform CMS contents.

The solution

Considering the client’s needs and expectations, we mutually decided to choose a technology stack that fulfilled the project’s requirements and is simple to maintain and to further develop. Together with the client, our developers have designed and implemented a full backend solution based on Node.js, which is lightweight but fast and an efficient tool, perfectly suited to such comprehensive web platforms with three apps and with a complex backend. Together, we also chose a SQL database with Sequelize to build a database solution tailored to the requirements and types of user data.

To create a frontend layer our developers used Angular. One of the overarching goals was to digitize and integrate the entire business layer and create internal, made-to-measure tools for comprehensive management, such as CMS, DAM, CRM and ERP systems and data entry validation rules. We also conducted a data migration from the previous version of the platform and a domain change, which required designing a proper site structure, URL redirection logic and optimization to save all SEO results in four languages. Developing such large projects requires planning, tasks division and tracking of progress. For this, we used such tools as Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket, combined with clear project management responsibilities and tester resources. Technology stack:

Node.js v4/v6 using ES6
Angular
Redis
Express.js
Webpack
SQL database with Sequelize
Jira / Confluence / Bitbucket
Cloudflare

The results

We have fulfilled the requirements and expectations of groups.swiss by creating a modern, scalable, user-oriented infrastructure (web and backend), prepared for easy maintenance and further developments with the same stability and performance. It was a complex, and long-term project requiring the involvement and cooperation of a large team of developers specializing in various technologies.

Technologies we used

MySQL

Redis

Node.js

Angular

The Client’s opinion

Bettina Mindt Groups AG Managing Director

To a broad, challenging, and long-term project, Applandeo, as a software development company, brought in their know-how in software architecture, front-end and back-end solutions, web applications, etc. Open and transparent communication, the solution-oriented approach, and the willingness to go the extra mile for best client service were the key to successful project completion.

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Hi, I’m Marcin, COO of Applandeo

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