The client is an online travel platform offering a variety of accommodations and activities for sale across multiple Asia-Pacific markets. The client is a global Traveltech company based in London, UK* we have had a relationship with for over 4 years of successful code and design deliveries.

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Intro

Our team members developed an international hotel booking platform based on multiple Japanese hotel platform APIs. It was our second project for the same Client showing his trust in our abilities to deliver a successful digital product. 

The challenge

Our goal was to build a seamless Hotel booking platform based on the booking system and databases taken from two Japanese APIs providers. 

APIs had issues with not sufficient documentation, comments written in Japanese, connection issues, and different values for test and production API.

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One of our biggest project management challenges was asynchronous communication caused by different time zones as we had to integrate the team in Japan with the team in Europe. The second significant challenge was team members' change during software development. 

The product's goals and its most important challenges:

• Allow users to search and book Japanese hotels on our platform. 
• Integrate international payment systems into our platform.
• Allow full BE communication between our Database and different Japanese Databases. 
• Prepare platforms BE for completely different technical approaches in Japanese APIs.
• Reduce data transfer delays caused by slow communication between European and Japanese servers

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The solution

Bound by APIs we chose Ruby on Rails as our main tech stack for the platform. We also had to add some React.js elements to the Front End to display content more dynamically. 

First, our team members had to develop the Front end having in mind all the Japanese API limitations and differences and unifying our BE to prepare it.  In many cases, we had to preload and efficiently pull data from APIs to allow our users to book rooms unobstructed and smoothly. Payments were also a big challenge, we were able to overcome as the booking confirmation process with the Japanese API provider was causing timeouts of our requests. 

Team:

• 1 Senior Full Stack RoR developer - focused mainly on BE
• 1 Mid Full Stack RoR developer - focused on FE 
• 1 Designer 
• 1 Project Manager