Alpitour modernizes integration to accelerate service delivery with engineering group and TIBCO

Alpitour is a major Italian travel and tourism conglomerate, specializing in reservation services, tour packages, hotel, flight, and other travel-related services. Following several acquisitions, the company sought to service a growing volume of travel requests and enable customers and travel agencies alike with self-service capabilities. Alpitour needed to accelerate its time-to-market for new services and modernize digital booking processes.

The core challenge Alpitour faced was that its technical infrastructure couldn’t keep up with the growing volume of customer demand. To sell a vacation and compete against other travel service providers in the tourism industry, Alpitour must access, process, and deliver travel information to customers and partner agencies quickly. Its existing architecture simply couldn’t make information available fast enough, putting the company at a competitive disadvantage.

Local caching is a common architectural pattern used to accelerate a user’s access to data—rather than fetching data every time a user requests, it is stored nearby. Alpitour utilized this approach—but still ran its business data through a point-to-point architectural layer that lacked scalability and stifled its ability to service travel queries quickly.

To succeed in today’s travel booking world, where customers expect to execute complex bookings at lightning-fast speed, Alpitour ultimately needed to modernize a key technology stack for connecting endpoints together.

Transformation

The solution? Implementing an API-led integration layer built with microservices and containers. Alpitour turned to TIBCO partner Engineering Group to fuel its digital modernization, providing an API-led integration solution for the entire travel group.

Alpitour replaced its current platform (consisting of custom Java apps running in an app server) with a modern Red Hat OpenShift platform, which provides containers for the company to deploy microservices. TIBCO BusinessWorks Container Edition accelerated apps and data integration development with pre-built, out-of-the-box palettes and a wide range of connectors to enterprise endpoints and data sources. The TIBCO platform creates, orchestrates, manages, and governs APIs.

This new solution mixes online searches with a cache feeder that executes nightly caching of flight, hotel, and lodging data, making it immediately available to users the next day. Customers can easily and quickly check the latest availability for hotels and flights, prices, travel options, and more.

According to Maurizio Falzetta, solution architect at Engineering Group, “TIBCO allowed us to meet customer’s needs by respecting deadlines, using easy development, and optimizing solutions for our complex customer digitization process.”

Benefits

Alpitour’s API-led integration strategy with microservices and containers replaced its outdated architecture that couldn’t adapt quickly enough to changing market conditions. The travel group can now keep up with the digital demands of a modern travel booking experience via a new containerized infrastructure.

It’s now easier and faster for B2B and B2C customers to book travel; the new services architecture eliminates the previous data processes that caused problems in the travel package composition layer, by more granularly pinpointing data within given SLAs.

Additionally, B2B APIs expose a generic, optimized approach that easily integrates with all external agencies—facilitating faster onboarding. Previously, a dedicated integration had to be made for each individual external agency that wanted to connect to Alpitour’s infrastructure.

“TIBCO’s integration solutions provide the right balance of enterprise-grade strength and the leanness and flexibility we need to easily connect our data pipelines that allow us to stay competitive,” said Michele Ruberl, head of enterprise architecture and integration at Alpitour. “This is especially vital in a world where customers are hyper-connected and have demanding expectations. Access to novel inventory, and its exposition to our partners in the post-pandemic travel landscape, is key.”