Travel & Tourism Mobile App Development

About the Client

Location Bahrain

Industry Travel & Tourism

Spring Travel & Tourism is a leading name in Bahrain, offering touring facilities and related supplements.

It is an adequate travel company offering luxury corporate and leisure travel services and advisory, striving for client satisfaction by providing the highest level of service.

A primary focus areas for us are – Airlines Reservation & Ticketing Worldwide, Hotel / Car Rental Bookings, Tour Packages, Visas Application Assistance, Medical Tourism, Travel Insurance, Cruise Packages, Student Programmes.

Services we offered

Mobile app design and development

The Challenge

This client belongs to Bahrain, and is already running his travel business. Though, it became a headache for the management and control of routine work operations, information passing and acknowledgements. As it is a traveling business, there are recorded thousands of inquiries every day which were handled manually using general office softwares such as – MS Excel, Google Spreadsheet. Knowing this was not an ideal way of managing the data and controlling operations and acknowledgement, and hence the client has finally decided to move for having a dedicated solution to be built for offering better desk to staff members as well as a soft-level mobile app to customers to reduce in-person interactions which leads save interaction time and focus more towards business.

For us, it was a challenge to understand the client’s routine business operations, its workflow and also to feel the pain areas under their entire manual process. Our intention was not to just deliver a solution but also to bond with the client for the long term relationships.

As the Spring Travel & Tourism is covering different facilities, such as – Airlines Reservation & Ticketing Worldwide, Hotel / Car Rental Bookings, Tour Packages, Visas Application Assistance, Medical Tourism, Travel Insurance, Cruise Packages, Student Programmes, it was a challenge for us to understand each facility with respect to its data entity and workflow, discover lacking area and restore it with solution.

We defined the roadmap for the requirements gathering and analyzing, and for that, we appointed our senior business analyst to communicate with the client, and keep materializing the requirements on paper.

The business analyst discovered the possibilities of a solution, discussed the priority of tasks, identified key features, and prepared a preliminary schedule for the work execution.

Finding Expert Team

For the client, the fundamental need was to find an expert team who can understand the requirements at its route level, and having an earlier experience with the similar project so that could give a boost to development.

The client ended the search with us, i.e. Perception System, as we have an adequate experience of developing and well-maintaining the mid to large scale projects.

Team Screening

As a next step, before bringing the project on the floor, the client was inclined to get a proper screening of the team. Perception System allotted senior team members from different desks – business analysis, coding and database expertise, project coordinating, and service delivering.

The client was happy with the screening result as the team of the Perception System was courageous to accept the challenge. A proper planning and streamline work assignments to the allocated team resulted in the proven outcome as expected by the client.

Time limitations

Generally, software development is always a time-game. Entire project execution team always works under pressured environments and strives to complete project requirements within strict and scanty timelines. This is especially a challenge when working with international clients on multiple time-zones.

For the case of this project too, the client – Spring Travel & Tourism Time, asked us to deliver this project within a defined timeframe so they can start working on a new system effectively. The timeline given to us was of 18 sprints, covering 1 week per sprint. And, within this duration, the solution has to be ready, proven (QC), pushed to a live environment with an effective execution.

On-going Support & Maintenance

As said earlier, our intention was not just to offer a solution but to bond with the client on a long-term support to give a solution for the routine maintenance and futuristic enhancements, alongside to manage their data assets and web/mobile app integrity.

It seemed to be an easy thing to maintain the web and mobile app, though particular in this project, due to wavering nature of the tourism business, forced us to rethink and consciously define strategy for execution.

Project Scope

As the project was all about developing a touring app, and a back-office for management, the scope and its boundaries were clear enough, though it was lengthy in the work scale. Furthermore, several points, such as – easy to use customer app, variants of tour packages and their different workflows, etc., forced us to deal with the project execution in a conscious way.

Perception System allocated the senior engineer team, involving a business analyst, senior developers, QA engineer, and DevOps engineer. Starting from the role of a business analyst, who discussed, analyzed and then brought their business requirements on paper. The outcome of this business analysis process was – a detailed document, accompanying user flow diagrams, sketches, and wireframes.

Developing Mobile App and Web-based System

After having enough materialization of the system, we initiated the development of the web system first, followed by the mobile app. The web system covers the development of the database designing, preparing a ready-to-push environment (development/staging/live), choosing a scalable architecture for the futuristic enhancements, development of web-based back office system, and a development of web-service API to connect the mobile app with the server.

Whereas on the mobile app side, it covers the design integration (i.e. navigational mockups), integrating web service APIs, implementing logic (i.e. functionality) for every screen, etc.

Our development team analyzed and as per a project planner they started the development to achieve the completion within a defined time limits.

Performing QA/QC

Performing QC for this project was a bit tedious as we have to deal on both sides – a web and a mobile app. The small change in web service could cause a considerable change on the mobile app side or vice versa.

Hence, before we handover the development mobile app and web-system to our QC team, a joint panel that involves a project manager and a senior business analyst did a thorough verification and validation of development functionality to make sure about integrity of mobile app and web system as per client’s requirements.

After we handed it over to our QA (testing) team, they performed end to end QA/Testing of the entire system with the test cases that we developed using all the standard QA methodologies & tools. This QC process was a collaborative effort, involving our QA team as well as client so the UAT for the development solution can be achieved at the same time.

Deploying & Delivering the Final System to Client

Once the QC is performed and We provided a pre-configured Amazon AWS hosting environment where we did an initial level of business configurations and started deploying it via GIT pushing.

As a best practice, we put the provision of the back-up server and staging environment to accommodate any requested updates on the staging environment before confirming it to go live.

Alongside, the mobile app team published the apps on respective stores – Google Play and Apple iTunes stores.

Providing Support & Maintenance

As per scale of the project, we were committed to offer long-term support for maintaining the web system and mobile app. Hence, as soon as a free maintenance support period ended, the client expected to sign an SLA agreement to preserve streamline maintenance support for their project. This includes routing health check, database backup, fixing bugs and deprecating issues, futuristic enhancements, design and cosmetic changes etc.m business, forced us to rethink and consciously define strategy for execution.

Solution

A better planning and an organized effort while an entire cycle of project execution resulted in an effective solution as the client needed.

A solution that came up finally, courage the client and their staff members to easily and quickly move on to a new system, as well their customers to plan out their journey and get an easy way of booking their tours tickets.

As we had a thorough understanding session, and past experience of developing such touring apps, helped us to deliver the solution effectively as well as within a timeline.