Aaron Group s.r.o.

Work for a company whose main activities are:

• Developing a system for searching and booking flights through the official channels (GDS and NDC) and integrations with the data sources of the individual airlines.
• Selling a solution for travel agencies to manage and organise individual tour departures and their customers.

My role on this project consisted mainly of upgrading existing NDC connectors and building new ones for the airlines under contract.

NDC is a standardised protocol set up as an effort to develop an alternative to the existing GDS, which in some respects no longer suits the modern business environment of the airline industry, above all:

• it is a rigid reservation system developed back in the late 1970s
• it is significantly limited when it comes to selling ancillary services, extra metadata and personalised offers, for example
• it is still a monopoly - it brokers the majority of sales for the airlines, but its fees are fairly high
• the "owner" of the customer is still the agency or the OTA

So the work on this project consisted mainly of:

• refactoring and upgrading old, badly readable legacy code for existing connectors to newer versions of the NDC API
• implementing new NDC connectors for newly contracted airlines
• writing plenty of test scenarios and automated tests for every connector
• helping out with bugfixing found in the application outside the connector area
• smaller changes and extensions of features in the agency interface
• building and progressively deploying the application to the individual stage environments using JBoss EAP