dnata Travel Group delivers better booking experience with Azure Event Hub

Annually, the dnata Travel Group serves more than 9.5 million passengers from 3.5 million bookings, integrating with over 200 networks worldwide via its centralized platform. The company’s mission is to seamlessly connect travelers, travel providers, and airlines for an integrated, stress-free booking experience.  

“Historically, we had to manage technical complexities associated with integrating a host of different flight booking systems,” begins Simon Gent, Chief Architect at dnata Travel Group. “Differences in the underlying architecture meant developing unique APIs whenever we wanted to work with a new partner. From a business perspective, we were spending on development, and time, developing the same elements continually. We needed to consolidate everything into a single, easy-to-connect platform, improve speed to market, and boost scalability.” 

Time and cost savings

For the Group, the way forward was open-source—a flexible, scalable solution that would allow the company to compete with even the largest flight data providers in the market. Given the travel industry’s ever-evolving landscape, scalability was a must. “We needed a system that we could scale up and down instantly to reduce unnecessary costs and direct money back into the business. That meant a cloud deployment was critical,” added Gent.

For event management—a core component of the overall solution—dnata Travel Group considered a number of options before deciding to move ahead with the Azure Event Hub. “Right from the beginning, we felt that we should stay solution agnostic by leveraging Kafka protocols,” says Gent. The Kafka framework by Apache provides a unified platform for handling real-time data feeds, and can easily connect to external systems for data import and export. “After considering other options, we ended up choosing the Azure Event Hub, which is Kafka enabled. We knew it would be both easy to manage and would allow us to deliver the stability and uptime we needed, in line with our SLAs.” 

While tools and platforms helped make processes faster, a key piece in the dnata Travel Group’s transformation is the use of Azure DevOps. By changing how its internal teams handle projects, the travel company has replaced historically more complex processes with an agile workflow of plan, develop, deliver, and operate. Using Azure tools and other frameworks like Kubernetes, .NET Core 2 and Kafka, dnata’s developers now work off the same platform using shared libraries that keep everyone on the same page.

More travel options and faster market access

Today, the dnata Travel Group’s partners are reaping the rewards of the new solution. “Before, it could take us days to weeks to onboard a new client, with all of the testing and compatibility we had to go through,” explains Sean Kelly, Global Head of IT at dnata Travel Group. “Now there’s none of the same delay thanks to the microservices architecture and deployment models that we've put in place. We can onboard a new client in under an hour.”    

The new platform is also delivering dramatic benefits to the dnata Travel Group’s end users. “Before, travelers might see 40 to 100 flight options after querying, whereas now they can compare and contrast thousands. Thanks to the ability to truly scale out the system we can really deliver a massive wealth of data to the end user,” says Kelly.  

The travel platform can handle more than 52 million monthly search requests. This enables dnata Travel Group to keep up with the dramatic rise of monthly search requests compared to the 600,000 recorded in May 2021, especially as more brands get onboarded.  

dnata Travel Group is also looking to expand the platform’s capabilities, including smart caching. By recording common search queries, it hopes to optimize requests to data providers, reducing duplication and lessening data demands.   

“Our goal was creating an effective distributed search contents model, which is critical to how we sell flights as a product,” shares Kelly. “That meant consolidating and orchestrating multiple providers very quickly and easily. The same principles apply to other products, whether we're selling flights, hotels, cars or transfers. We really want to replicate this into the other areas of our business, so we can really benefit from the cost savings and scalability.” 

The process of company-wide change has already begun. “More and more, we see ripple effects going through to other projects,” Kelly explains. “It’s been a groundbreaking experience, pure and simple.”