I am asked to prepare a quotation for a customer to make flight booking system within a tourism website. I do not know about how I can find and handle the international fight databases for booking purpose. If you can provide me links to similar, it would be great. I should include the cost of the API/database if applies. The customer is only concerned about the final solution.
What is the best way to solve this issue in their website?
Hi,
This was asked on Stack Overflow a while back.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4011123/is-there-an-api-for-booking-flights-and-or-cruises
The page contains a whole bunch of good links and suggestions.
It seems to me that your client, who is in the travel business, should be TELLING you which booking system they want to use, rather than ASKING you, bearing in mind you don’t know anything about these systems. (And neither do I, by the way).
Surely the choice of a travel booking system is a fundamental business and commercial decision for the travel business owners, not something to be palmed off to the website designer? You will quickly be blamed for all the inevitable perceived shortcomings of the system you recommend based on such minimal information, that’s for certain!
Let your client do their own research and come up with a list of possibilities. They don’t sound very serious, if this is how they choose their core business systems. I strongly suggest staying well within the limits of your own expertise. Personally, I wouldn’t touch this job with a bargepole. It’s got ‘imminent disaster’ written all over it :badpc:
Paul
@Pullo: Thank you. I found ClearTrip has better documentation among the list.
@Unit7285: Nice suggestions there.
Handling this customer seems very tough. Every steps I know further about the requirements; it is very likely to increase the time and unpleasing budget.
May be the customer is just an investor who is owning a travel business tied up with some other IATA licensed ticketing agents.
He just wanted to have such solution. And I have strong pressures to learn/find/research several things about it.
I myself cannot decide whether to quit this possible project because of the management hierarchy.
And I do not want to invite the disaster as well.
Sadly, very few resources on this topic exist on the Internet.
Great advice. Be careful with this. Give the client some options, but encourage them to make the best decision from a business perspective and not just based on tech.
Seconding this advice as well, but I would go a step further. Quite regularly I see someone who seems to look an industry leader in software in an industry, set an arbitrary budget and then find someone who will promise the solution. These clients are per definition not interested in even requirements gathering, they are effectively looking for someone who will start the project - minimal or no deposit - and then fail.
If they are devious they just want to sell the unfinished (or you could call it doomed) project to the next investor or scam someone out of money for it.
HTH, Jochen