Any travel business that uses a booking engine faces this question sooner or later. The booking engine is functioning just fine, customers place bookings on it and yet somehow things just don’t feel right. Development takes much more time, the integration with suppliers doesn’t work properly, and rivals seem to deliver new features in weeks while it takes you months to do that.
The truth is that the option of total rebuilding is not required as often as vendors tell and not as seldom as finance department expects. Read this article to learn how to make a decision.
Why travel portals age differently
A travel portal is not a regular web application. It has to serve customers, dozens of suppliers (airlines, hotels, car rental, activities), payment providers and back-office systems. This leads to pressures that not every software has to deal with:
Integration sprawl. GDS connections, NDC airline content, channel managers, aggregators and direct APIs all require varying degrees of integration, from version-dependent middleware to constantly-deprecated content channels.
Search and pricing capabilities. Availability, dynamic pricing, markups, commissions and currency conversion need to be performed in near real-time, on a massive scale, during peak seasons.
Evolving customer expectations. Customers use the best apps in their category so they expect the same level of UI/UX from the portal: first-time checkout confirmation, mobile-first design and instant self-service changes are now table stakes.
Regulations and security. Things like PCI DSS, GDPR and similar data protection laws, stronger authentication and accessibility standards are constantly updated.
Due to changing requirements, a portal solution that was perfectly fine 5 years ago might be insecure, unable to scale or comply with current regulations.
Three options, not two
The discussion typically is conducted in terms of upgrading versus rebuilding. In practice there are three paths:
- Upgrade in place. Update frameworks, libraries, hosting and security; fix performance hot spots; update UI. The building structure remains unchanged.
- Incremental modernization. Replace parts of the system incrementally with new components, sometimes in a Stranger pattern: new services gradually assume functionality of the old, core services behind a common front door and finally the old core can be removed.
- Full rebuild. Design, build a new platform, migrate data/supplier and cut over.
The majority of modernizations that are successful are in the second. A rebuild is not standard – it is a special case.
Signs you can keep upgrading
Patching and upgrading is usually enough when:
Your technology platform is maintained and there are enough experts for hire.
The integration with vendors is solid and well documented.
Release cycles are slow due to procedural difficulties rather than the inherent antagonism of the code.
Conversion rates and uptime are adequate, and the value proposition is based on marginal improvements.
Otherwise, rebuilding would be wasteful expenditure of the budget in order to discover business logic embedded in your current system.
Signs you should modernize incrementally
Choose the strangler approach when:
System is a monolith, where changes in one part often affect others, but business logic is useful.
There is a demand for modern functionalities right now, such as a mobile application or personalized content, without having to wait several years.
There is no possibility to use a risky big-bang transition, which is typical for most travel companies with season-dependent income.
Various sections of portal have their own requirements. For example, search section may require a rewrite, and content management – minor refactoring.
One of the typical sequences of the process is beginning with customer front end (headless, API-powered storefront), followed by extraction of search and pricing functionality, payments and booking orchestration, and finally replacement of legacy core.
Signs you should rebuild
Rebuilds become justified when many of these criteria exist at the same time, not just one:
1. End-of-life technology. The language, framework or database has been stopped for any security patches and a rewrite of the majority of the code is necessary.
2. Business model is not compatible with the architecture. In case the company wants to transition from a single supplier booking to dynamic packaging, multi-currency marketplace, or B2B2C white-labelling while the data model does not allow for that, an additional layer of complexity only means fragility.
3. Cost of change has become prohibitively expensive. Simple changes are taking months, regression testing is mostly manual, and releases are stressful.
4. Knowledge has walked-out the door. With no original team on board, documentation missing and none knowing the pricing or booking rules inside and out, the system becomes a black box. Rebuild means discovering the business rules again but at a high price.
5. Security and compliance risk is unmanageable. Payment data handled in ways that make the PCI scope enormous, or personal data scattered across systems with no clear ownership, can justify the restart.
6. Inability to scale up is structural. If the peak-season outages persist after the tuning, caching and infrastructure upgrades, the limits may appear in the design itself..
With only one or two criteria existing at the same time, incremental changes should be seriously considered.
A quick diagnostic
Score your portal honestly on these questions:
How long does it take to ship a small change to production, from request to live?
How much time % is spent on maintenance and firefighting as compared to new features?
Is it possible to add a new supplier within weeks or is it a matter of quarters?
How many incidents are there in a year when releases occur?
Will you be able to recruit and keep the engineers you have in your stack?
Can the platform be considered secure, accessible and privacy requirement without much effort?
Do you feel that you are losing deals or conversions to competitors due to features you cannot develop?
If the answers are mostly "uncomfortable" and the root cause is architectural, then a serious business case for rebuilding should be made. If the problems are uneven, correct them and make live.
The expenses that people do not think about
Rebuild estimates often understate the real work:
Parallel running. During migration you'll have to pay for 2 platforms.
Supplier recertification. New integrations may need to be tested and certified by many suppliers and GDS/NDC providers.
Data migration. Bookings, customer profiles, loyalty balances and financial records need to be transferred correctly – including future-dated bookings.
Risk of SEO and traffic. Don't do this if you're relaunching a website without caution: it can ruin years of search ranking. URL mapping and redirects are a must.
Opportunity cost. While the team rebuilds what you already have, competitors ship new features.
Change management. Training and new workflows are needed for customer service, finance and operations teams.
A general rule of thumb is that a rebuild should provide something that the previous platform did not.
How to reduce risk if you do rebuild
Risk reduction steps if you choose to rebuild
First, define the end result. Link your initiative to the measurable results like the conversion rate, loading speed, time to onboard suppliers and cost per booking.
Document your business rules. Identify the pricing logic, commissions and cancellation policies in your old software before you dismantle it.
Release in smaller portions. Regardless of the rebuild process, deploy on market, brand or line level, not all at once.
Use composable components. Prefer API-based, headless technology and managed services over a new monolith.
Prepare for cutover. Practice your migration process, set criteria for rollback, and don’t deploy during the high travel season.
keep the old system live until you trust your new one.
Conclusion
The issue is not how old is your portal but rather whether that it costs more than reinvestment. Upgrade when the fundamentals are solid and there is potential for modernization, modernize incrementally where the value is tied up in an inflexible system, and rebuild entirely if nothing fits with technology, architectural, security, or economic constraints.
Whatever the choice, start with the facts: delivery time, incidence, conversion, and cost to maintain. Decisions based on facts usually lead to travel portals that people love and development teams can maintain. Build or upgrade travel portal with a strong determination and choose a perfect travel booking software provider who can give you the right support for your better travel business.
Also Read: Custom Software Development vs Off-the-Shelf Software - How to Choose the Right Path