Day Dreams

Daydreams is a web portal that provides 24x7 online hotel searches.

Over View:

daydreams is a web portal that provides 24x7 online hotel searches.

Technology  :    Joomla
Application Type  :   WebPortal
Application Scale  :   Medium

It provides the option to buy special offer coupons which can be used in any of the daydreams supported hotels for the provided number of days. Using this portal, guests can take a virtual tour of hotels across Europe, view hotel offerings, and purchase special offer coupons. daydreams provides a truly interactive, collaborative, and enjoyable experience that nurtures guest loyalty.

Requirement:

The client has been using a portal developed using Mambo CMS. It had many limitations because of which the primary requirement identified was to migrate to Joomla! CMS. In the first phase, all the contents were to be migrated to Joomla! 1.0, and later to version 1.5X.

Challenges:

The previous version of the website developed using Mambo was done by a different team. There were no requirements specifications or release notes available. Therefore, the primary challenge was to identify the functionalities and understand the core changes made.

The second challenge was to migrate all the data from the existing system to the new system.

Since continuous updates have been happening for the almost three years, tracking the changes and rollbacks made during this period was yet another challenge.

Solution:

First the team generated script to synchronize hotel details in existing database with a new database. The data from remote database was sent as a web service using whdl protocol. Then the data was parsed in our server using XML parser and synchronized with our database.

Three types of hotel search functionalities were developed: Standard, Emotional and Google API.

• Standard search:  In standard search the user can navigate to a hotel in the order country, region, city. Option to filter based on months of functioning was also added in the subsequent phases.
• Emotional search:   This was based on hotel images that were displayed randomly at a predefined frequency. When the user clicks on an image, he will be routed to description page.
• Google Map Search:  User can navigate to a hotel description page using the Google map provided in the site.

Hotel description page:

The hotel description page shows details such as facilities, customer feedback, rates and so on which makes it easier for the guest to take a decision.

Additional features like User Survey details, Recommend to a Friend, Add to Favourites list were added later which will help to enhance loyalty and create a community.

Newsletter Subscription:The Joomla! newsletter component, Letterman, was edited to merge to the application super mailer to bring the required newsletter functionality.Community:The Joomla! community component profiler is used to develop the community option in the site. The community work is in the development phase. Additional plug-ins are being developed to bring the details like favourite hotels, hotels booked, etc, inside the community.

Business Benefits:

The portal helped to improve user experience and response time by leveraging Web 2.0 technology. Beyond making search and reservations easy, daydreams also helped to build loyalty through an interactive and synergetic experience. Through advanced features and functionalities, there was a significant increase in the traffic and the number of repeat visitors.

Summary:

PIT Solutions was successful in implementing a phased development strategy which helped to implement the migration with minimum disruption to daydream’s services.

 

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