flieg-ab-Basel GmbH Internet travel portal project

flieg-ab-Basel is an online travel agency, specialised for flights from and to Basell International Airport (Switzerland). The main goal of the flieg-ab-Basel project was to develop the online booking system for flights, hotels, travel tours and car rental.

As a small-sized company with a small budget flieg-ab-Basel is forced to find a cost efficient solution for the development of a highly customised application providing interfaces to a large number of external travel systems. 
Within the project special skills in interface development, using XML/XSL were required. Additionally all programmers should speak German due to the big share of front-end development, required in this project.

Due to the specialized requirements for that client Technopark developed a three step approach  to build up the recruiting, the programming team and the workflows: 

• Technopark developed the project plan together with FaB in an initial workshop. As a result the key requirements concerning developer skills and number as well as the organisational structure and the time frame of the project were defined.
• Technopark recruited the programming team and prepared the employment contracts. Moreover, Technopark provided offices and the IT and communication infrastructure.
• FaB managed and controlled the whole project development process.
• FaB was fully responsible for the system design, project management and system testing.
• The project management and testing team operated in Germany. Through the use of modern, Internet-based communication technologies only a small number of personal team meetings are necessary.

The booking system contained the following modules:

• Dynamic Web front end for checking availability and booking of flights, hotels, travel tours and car rental based on PHP and MySQL.
• Plug-in XML-Interfaces to the reservations system Sabre Merlin using the T.I.B.E.T booking engine. Administration front-end for the management of bookings and customers.
• Marketing module for Newsletter Marketing and the integration of bonus point systems like Miles&More.

The booking system was developed and implemented with only 45% of the development costs compared to the development in Germany.
 
Due to the flexible contracting the number of developers were easily decreased to a core team after the successful implementation of the system. The core team will be responsible for the further optimisation of the system.