History Projects Review – CTC.com.sg – Start of Our Travel Journey

Posted by Lee Peng on July 21, 2012

It was a 7 years journey with Commonwealth Travel, marking the start of our relationship with the travel industry…

We were back then a tiny company and we managed to win the contract against another vendor who is more experienced in the field. Really appreciate the first management group who trust us and gave us the opportunity.

The original website before revamp wasn’t rich in content and features…

The requirements were very brief. They want a more vibrant website that has the component of tours (group / free & easy / cruise), flights, hotels, membership and booking enquiries.

We know nuts about travel back then. But we know how to organise data and information and learn through what we have.
So our tiny Bukit Batok office was full of product booklets, brochures, flyers, price sheets as it if we want to travel around the world.

We work with the marketing team and we didn’t arrange direct interviews with other department. Something due to our lack of experience. Haha. Anyway, we did study other products to figure out what shall we do. It is kind of open specs project anyway.

Timeline was very tight. We signed the contract in late May and wish to LIVE in mid Aug. The most “lucky” was we have another Headhunting company system project signed at the same time and I was the only programmer -_-!!
Thank God that Patrick join us as intern during his university school holiday and we have 2 “team” working on different project.

After 2 months of 10am – 11pm fights, here is the result

(The WayBack Machine didn’t capture the background image properly. The actual one looks much nicer. Trust me!)

The new website is much comprehensive in feature:
- Structured tour information for group, free & easy and cruise
- Upload of group tour price and availability from back office system
- Complex free & easy and cruise price matrix (pls imagine for cruise, you have different departure seasons, different deck, different cabin etc)
- Flights and rates
- Hotels and rates
- Comprehensive booking enquiry form so that most of the traveller information are captured
- Travel club membership
- Travel club privileges directory

Technically, PHP + PostgresSQL were used. pgSQL was selected because MySQL 4 didn’t has the sufficient features we want.

Many has contributed to the successful launch of this project, especially the young and dynamic CTC marketing team back then.

Anyway, the journey started and many things happened after this…