Reducing Costs of Sales by 7% with Airline Reservation System

Our client is one of the largest travel groups in Germany with more than 2000 employees on board. The company offers a first-class destination management solution in two separate segments: for tour operators and for airlines.

The Challenge

The group operates scheduled flights to recreation destinations in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, the Indochinese Peninsula, South Asia and North America. With more than 80 regular flight destinations, the company’s legacy sales systems couldn’t manage data efficiently anymore. So, the client was looking for a partner to reengineer their business-critical legacy systems to process flight-related data better.

Strategic Partnership

Having already worked with dozens of Skelia’s experts in other domains, the German travel group also chose Skelia as a perfect fit for implementation of the new digital strategy. Leveraging its core strength of building stable cross-border organizations, Skelia set up experienced software engineering teams in Ukraine, operating as a seamless extension of the travel group’s local engineering department. Skelia’s team included a technical lead, four Java developers and one QA engineers, and was in charge of streamlining and optimizing the airline booking and post-booking processes. Along with software engineering and testing, the team also provided operation and maintenance services. Additionally, Skelia built and ensured the ongoing operation of incident, configuration and release management teams according to the ITIL standards and methods.

The Results

Throughout three years of fruitful cooperation, Skelia managed to successfully replace three legacy systems with a single solution.

The Skelia team created a B2B platform based on the microservices architecture, developed new and integrated the existing applications, including three major modules:

Flight seats management system
automatically imports, parses, compares and processes daily data from airline companies. It includes information about prices and the number of available seats for a specific flight on a specific date. After processing, the system assigns statuses to changes and creates suggestions with these changes that can be sent to an internal airline system. Along with automatic data processing, users can make changes manually via the UI.

Flight price management system
is used by purchasers to debate the initial prices with airlines before starting a new season. Users add all flights for the season to the system, negotiate prices and the number of seats for a flight and make corresponding changes in the system. The system also allows importing price changes from airlines: it finds the necessary flights to import in the system, and export data in different formats

Invoice verification system
reduces the invoice processing cost for the client by automating workflow processes. It allows multi-channel data entry and modification, automatic invoice verification with predefined matching, transformation of the exported information into a suitable format.

This allowed the client to optimize company workflows, reducing manual work and increasing the overall efficiency as a result.