Scaling Operations with Modern Hotel PMS Software

Company Name

Location

United Kingdom

Industry

Client

Vestibule Marketing Ltd., formed in 2007, has been providing technology and services in the accommodation vertical of hospitality, with the main focus on delivering exceptional design and usability solutions and outstanding, uncompromised service for accommodation businesses.

Having their customers at the heart of every feature they introduce, Vestibule facilitates and helps connect and market accommodation with guests, making business growth possible for their customers easier. By offering various services to increase revenues, sales, and marketing reach, both off- and online, they help businesses focus on giving guests a great experience, promoting the brand, and innovating in the industry.

In particular, “Elina” PMS, a personalized, cloud-based software from Vestibule Marketing Ltd., allows accommodation providers to reduce operational costs and maximize revenue while delivering the best possible customer service without special interfacing or complicated installations. “Elina” PMS successfully works today for various serviced apartments and vacation rentals in more than 20 counties worldwide, managing reservations, guests, invoicing, websites, reports, and more.

Challenge

Providing innovative and holistic solutions for business growth, Vestibule Marketing Ltd. wanted to ensure they have the capacity and technical capability to grow themselves, handling customers faster and more effectively.

The initial architecture of three monolith applications that had to be installed for every new accommodation provider could prevent Vestibule Marketing Ltd. from this fast and easy business growth in the future. Adding every new client would require the installation of three applications every time, increasing the cost and time for new clients’ integrations.

Additionally, Vestibule Marketing Ltd. wanted to enrich their flagship property management software for serviced apartments, apart-hotels, and growing vacation rental providers, “Elina” PMS, with further integrations for services diversification and make architectural changes to enable handling more customers and bigger accounts. Besides, Vestibule provided its clients with BookingEngine, which was directly connected to “Elina” PMS.

Solution

To create a productive environment for future growth, Vestibule Marketing Ltd. turned to DataArt for a solid team augmentation strategy, as well as for a custom migration plan, both efficient in cost and operations.

Starting with the discovery stage to reduce risks, cut costs, and create a reliable roadmap to new features, the DataArt team successfully helped develop a flexible migration plan for a big project with restricted resources, organizing a graduate migration to a new engine.

The DataArt team helped define the scope of future relevant integrations for “Elina” PMS, adding flexibility and resilience to the entire product. The following integrations helped Vestibule reinforce operations adding a more granular and diversified approach to working with hotels and other service providers:

For flexible handling of rates and restrictions: MinLOS, MaxLOS, CTA, CTD, BlockedDays/StopSell
New Invoicing Module for a faster and more stable solution than the old one, also it was moved into a service from a monolith
Import API's to enable third parties to connect to the client's system or for hotels to move their data from other solutions to the client's. DataArt's engineers created an API for Guest/Staff/Owners Import, Reservation Import, Reservation Export, and Rates and Restrictions Import/Export. This also allowed other integrations to become a part of the initial solution (such as Rates Management Systems)
Custom Fields implementation allows users to create custom fields for main entities needed for their specific flow
Person Classifications implementation allows customers to specify limits per property for custom entities
Property Categorizations improved flexible amenities for Units
Moved images handling into a service
Moved auth/token handling to Identity Server

Outcomes

The joint team orchestrated a large number of integrations into a single system and created a resilient and flexible architecture. Besides, DataArt helped maintain the core values of the product and successfully contributed to the qualitative improvement of the solution:

Improved operations and performance: decreased page loading time from 90 seconds to 2 seconds thanks to data optimization
A holistic approach to working with payment gateways mitigates risks of duplicated and failed transactions
Comprehensive data cleaning mechanisms help de-risk the development process when working with multiple integrations

In the long run, the ten-year-long partnership with DataArt helped Vestibule Marketing Ltd. evolve its solution, increase the universality and resilience of “Elina” PMS, diversify areas of business operations, and expand globally, add new regions and industries to their client's map.

The enhanced flexibility of the platform allowed Vestibule Marketing Ltd. to focus on working with serviced apartments, enabling handling owners to leverage more features and benefit from customized services.

DataArt has been our strategic partner for over ten years, helping us mature our product to be worldwide and industry-leading. In addition to great quality developers, DataArt has provided a rich knowledge base of the overall best practices for process, security, product discovery, and design and technical architectures. This all has helped Vestibule Marketing Ltd. perfect the entire development and maintenance process of our product, “Elina”. This rich partnership has also grown and skilled-up team members within the DataArt employees and those working directly for Vestibule Marketing Ltd. DataArt is more than just a technology provider – their relationship with us has enabled our growth and success as a company.

Christopher Lovold

Managing Director at Vestibule Marketing Ltd.

Highlights

TeamCity+Octopus allowed switching to a feature-branch flow, enabling easier release and hotfix preparation, accelerated deploy-to-production flow, as well as making it fully automated
Integration of multiple payment services considered the preferences of different Vestibule Marketing's clients and enabled them to benefit from services in different regions, such as Scandinavia, Pacific Asia, etc.
Migration of ca. 600 applications to a new server, to date, nullified maintenance time

Integrations

Channel Managers

Staah
Siteminder
Cubilis
ResDiary
HomeAway

ePOS

TenderPOS
RevelPOS

Accounting

Xero

Other

AeTM (Amadeus Travel Management)
Snapshot
GuestLine

Payments

Adyen
Barclay
Netaxept
QuickPay
SaferPay
SagePay (Opayo)
Stripe
CashFlow

Technology Stack

.NET Framework 4.8

.NET Core 3.1

.NET 5

MSSQL Server 2012

(current live server)

MSSQL Server 2016

(new live server)

Asp.NET MVC

WebApi

WebForms

AngularJS/React

UmbracoCMS

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