Case studyTravel & Hospitality
Revolutionizing the Travel & Tourism Industry with Technology
How modern booking platforms, personalization and mobile-first design are changing what travelers expect, and what it takes to deliver it.
Industry
Travel & Hospitality
Booking engines, distribution connectivity and personalization built to lift conversion and cut manual work.
MBE certified (Minority Business Enterprise)
Overview
Technology in Travel & Hospitality
Travel and hospitality companies win or lose on the booking experience, and on how well systems behind it connect. A slow mobile checkout or a rate that fails to reach a channel is lost revenue.
Desmata builds booking platforms, connects them to property, reservation and distribution systems, and uses guest and booking data for personalization and revenue decisions. We also staff the developers and analysts for those teams.
Our work in this sector includes the redesign of a major global tourism agency's customer platform, summarized below.
Start with a conversation
Tell us what you are working on. A member of the Desmata team will reply by email or phone.
Call us on +1 (214) 407-8089Challenges
What technology leaders here are dealing with
Challenge 1: Mobile booking friction
Most searches start on a phone, and every extra form field or slow page costs conversions. Teams need fast search, clear pricing and simple payment steps.
Challenge 2: Distribution complexity
Airlines are moving to NDC, hotels sell through a CRS, channel managers and OTAs, and GDS content differs by carrier. Keeping rates, availability and fares consistent across channels is constant work.
Challenge 3: Guest data spread across systems
PMS, CRS, CRM, loyalty and booking engine data rarely agree on who the guest is. That limits personalization and makes repeat engagement hard to measure.
Challenge 4: Payment security
Booking pages and property systems handle card data, and PCI DSS 4.0.1 expects control of payment page scripts and strong access controls. Fraud and chargebacks add to the cost.
Challenge 5: Manual back-office work
Reconciliation, itinerary changes, group bookings and supplier payments often depend on spreadsheets and email. Staff time goes to repeating tasks instead of serving customers.
How we help
Where Desmata fits in
Build the booking platform
Search, booking and account experiences for web and mobile, backed by API-first services that connect to supplier and property systems.
Plan the replatform
Assess the current stack, set a target architecture and sequence the move so bookings keep flowing during the change.
Personalization and revenue analytics
A unified guest and booking data model that feeds recommendations, offers and pricing decisions, and measures repeat engagement.
Secure payments and guest data
Tokenized payments, fraud controls, identity and access management and privacy handling, designed for PCI DSS and for GDPR and CCPA where they apply.
Scale for peak travel seasons
Cloud architecture that handles sale days and holiday surges with autoscaling and tested failover.
Staff your travel technology team
Booking engine, integration, mobile and data roles on contract, contract-to-hire or direct hire, or a managed team for a product area.
Use cases
What we deliver in this sector
Booking engine and checkout redesign
Faster search, clearer pricing, saved traveler details and fewer payment steps on mobile and desktop.
PMS, CRS and channel manager integration
Two-way connections that keep rates, inventory and reservations in step across property and distribution systems.
GDS and NDC connectivity
Airline content through GDS and direct NDC connections, normalized into one search and booking flow.
Loyalty and personalization
Guest profiles, offers and recommendations that use stay and booking history to drive repeat bookings.
Back-office automation
Automated reconciliation, itinerary changes and supplier payment workflows that remove repeated manual steps.
Mobile apps for travelers and staff
Digital check-in, itinerary management and service requests for guests, plus task tools for property teams.
Talent
Roles we staff
- Booking engine developer
- PMS and CRS integration developer
- GDS and NDC integration engineer
- Channel manager integration developer
- Mobile developer (iOS, Android, React Native)
- Front-end developer
- Payments engineer
- Data engineer, travel analytics
- Revenue management analyst
- QA automation engineer
- Product manager, digital booking
Regulations and standards
Standards we design for
The rules that shape technology work in this sector, and that we build and staff around.
PCI DSS 4.0.1
Booking sites and property systems that handle card data fall under PCI DSS. We design to reduce scope with tokenization and script controls, and we staff engineers with experience in PCI environments.
IATA NDC standard
NDC is IATA's XML and API standard for airline offers and orders, and a growing share of airline content is moving to it. We build integrations against NDC alongside GDS connections.
OpenTravel specifications
The OpenTravel Alliance publishes message standards for hotel, car and activity distribution. We work with them when connecting suppliers and channels.
GDPR and CCPA
International guests and loyalty programs bring EU and state privacy duties. We build consent, access and deletion into guest data systems.
ADA and WCAG
Booking sites and apps are subject to accessibility expectations, and WCAG is the working benchmark. We build and test to it.
These are the regulations and standards that shape work in this sector. We design and staff for them. They are not certifications held by Desmata.
Technology
Platforms and technologies in this sector
- Sabre
- Amadeus
- Travelport
- IATA NDC APIs
- Oracle OPERA Cloud
- Mews
- SiteMinder
- OpenTravel messages
- Adyen and Stripe
- React and React Native
- Apache Kafka
- Snowflake
- Salesforce
Proof
Our work in practice
Case highlight
Travel Sector Digital Revamp
Desmata redesigned the B2C platform of a major global tourism agency. The engagement covered the customer experience and the automation of back-office tasks behind it. The client is not named here.
25%
increase in repeat customer engagement
20%
reduction in manual back-office tasks via automation
40%
increase in online booking conversions
Services
Services that support this work
Technology
Digital Product Engineering
Custom software architecture, full-stack and mobile development, API-first microservices and legacy modernization. Home of RetailGeo Insights.
Advisory
Digital Transformation
We assess your current setup, implement the right digital tools, automate manual work and train your teams, with minimal disruption.
Technology
AI & Advanced Analytics
Predictive modeling, NLP and machine learning, and real-time stream processing with Kafka, Spark and Flink.
Technology
Cybersecurity & Risk Mitigation
Security assessments and posture audits, identity and access management, endpoint detection, threat monitoring and incident response.
Talent
IT Staffing & Strategic Resourcing
Specialized recruitment for IT, data, cybersecurity and product roles, with proprietary candidate-matching intelligence and recruiters who have focused on IT since 2012.
Insights
Our thinking in this sector
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Can you connect our booking engine to our PMS and channel manager?
Yes. We build and test two-way integrations for rates, inventory and reservations, with error handling and reconciliation reports. We start from the systems you already run.
Do you work with NDC and GDS content?
Yes. We build integrations to airline NDC APIs and to GDS platforms, and normalize the content into one search and booking flow. Which carriers and fare types to include depends on your agreements.
How do you approach payment security on booking pages?
We reduce what touches your servers with hosted fields and tokenization, control scripts on payment pages and limit access to cardholder data. Your payment provider and assessor determine your PCI DSS obligations.
Can we start with one part of the journey, such as checkout?
Yes. Many clients begin with checkout or search because conversion gains show up quickly. We then extend to personalization and back-office automation as results justify it.
Plan your booking platform upgrade
Share where bookings drop off or where staff spend time on manual work. We will map a practical plan and the team to deliver it.
MBE certified (Minority Business Enterprise)