Booking Engine Platform

Providing a unified experience for online hostel accommodation

One of the biggest challenges for hotels and established brands in the travel sector has been the growth of online travel agents (OTAs) and search aggregators. They’ve taken a huge slice of market share and positioned themselves at the forefront of customers’ minds. The ability for Hostelling International (HI) member organisations to have control over how they take their product to market, promote, sell and manage it, has become critical to their profitability in this low margin market.

Each member country within the HI network operates as a separate organisation under the global framework. Across this network, and across each national member organisation, different front desk reservation systems were used to manage accommodation reservations – complicating the ability to enable online sales.

Process: The Hostel Booking Engine Platform

From previous experience, Boomworks held a solid understanding of the challenges within the hostel market and the technical challenges faced with the integration of a single reservation interface. Within the Boomworks Ventures framework, an entirely new platform was conceived that could service a variety of HI member countries.

Working in Pilot Accelerator mode, we defined the specific business requirements and aligned these to existing capabilities or detailed new functionality to provide a detailed delivery model for the new platform. The platform connects the hostel front-desk reservation and management system to a customised online booking process. This enables customers to view real-time availability and complete a variety of transactions as well as centralising booking data and payments for easier management by the organisation.

Outcome: Core consistency and customisable interactions

Boomworks Experience design and delivery created a platform based around core booking components that connected various reservation systems into a layer of customisable functional components presented in a configurable user interface layer.

While each implementation of the Booking Engine Platform is deployed individually to accommodate each country’s specific business rules and platform architecture, the booking engine has been developed to be scalable through the utilisation of shared components. This enables development opportunities between the existing organisations and adds an incentive for additional countries in the group to move onto the platform. 

The Booking Engine Platform Venture was sold to a travel-focussed digital agency in 2020 encompassing the transition of the code base and support contracts through the process to guarantee continuity of service and ongoing feature development. At this point in time, the platform was in use by YHA Australia, HI USA, Hi Canada, YHA NZ and An Óige (Ireland).