Build A Travel Booking App Like Booking.com

Summary: The article demonstrates how to build a travel application like Booking.com, its market statistics, advantages, features, and technology stack. Further, it focuses on the design and development phases of the app and how to optimize it.

Today if we want to travel somewhere or go on vacation then the first thing that comes to our mind is finding the availability of hotels, tickets and booking them through an online portal. 

The rise of mobile and the internet had a positive impact on all sectors, and among them, travel and tourism are no exception. Applications like Booking.com, Tripadviser.com, Trivago, and Airbnb are the most popular hotel and travel booking applications. 

The growing number of users using these applications has increased the demand for travel booking apps. This fact has drawn the attention of startups, entrepreneurs, hotel businesses, and travel agencies and encouraged them to build such applications. 

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Travel and tourism mobile app market analysis and statistics

From overall travel booking, 80% of bookings are made via mobile applications making the mobile apps the first choice for travelers to book hotels and travel tickets.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the tourism industry, according to Statista, once the lockdown gets open the tourism industry will grow up to $1.7 trillion. It is estimated that the travel industry’s revenue will reach as much as 900 million by 2025. In addition, the revenue share of sales channels of the global travel and tourism market will increase up to 72% by 2025.

All these figures show that mobile applications are the first choice of travelers to book, pay, travel, and stay at their desired locations. 

Let’s understand the advantages of building travel booking applications.
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Advantages of building a travel booking app

Building a travel booking app has many benefits for customers, hoteliers, and the application owner. 

1. Customers: 

Customers can easily book their travel tickets for flights, rental cars, taxis, and hotels. Also, they will get discounts, convenience, and security on travel. Here are some best features,

• Search multiple hotels 

• Make easy payment 
• Cancel booking at any time
• Check reviews and feedback for each hotel
• 24/7 customer service

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2. Hotel and transportation business Owners: 

Hotel and transportation business owners can reach more customers, get direct bookings through the application, promote their brands, and set their rates as they wish.

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3. Application owner: 

Application owners can set service costs for hotels, travel agencies, partners and also get revenue from advertisement.

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Core features of the travel booking application platform

While creating a travel booking application, keep the following key features in your application for Customers, Property owners, and the Admin panel. You can add more features according to your requirement. 

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1. Features for Customers: (Mobile and web application)

• Signup/ Registration
• Login
• Manage personal account 
• Search bar with filter option
• Messaging system to communicate with hotels
• Push notification to update customers
• Check the availability option
• Save, share, and reserve and payment option
• Easy cancellation 
• Geolocation/ show on map (navigation for mobile apps )
• Rating and reviews
• Booking history

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2. Features for Property Owners: (Mobile and web application)

1. Sign up/register for a partner account
2. Account setting
3. Property Management Includes property details, photos, description, availability, and payment details 

4. Booking Management It includes the facility to track the reservation, cancel the reservation, and notify the owner of each reservation.

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3. Features for Admin Panel: (Web application)

To manage customer and partner applications, you need a suitable system. It is best to use the admin panel, which allows application owners to control, manage, support, and record important data. 

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Without these three applications and the basic functionality you can not create an application like Booking.com

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Walkthrough the Booking.com Technology stack

Tech Stack is the group of technologies used to build mobile or web applications. It is a combination of programming languages, UI/UX design, development environment, framework,  utilities, servers, tools, and services used by the development team. 

Before designing an application, it is important to list the issues to be resolved, the scope of your project, time to deliver the market, the security perspective,  and scalability. Depending on these factors, you need to choose the technology solution that has the potential to solve these problems. 

Let us have a look through the technology stack used in booking.com.

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1. Application and data

• jQuery: Javascript Library
• Python: Programming language
• NGINX: Web Server
• MySQL:  Database
• Redis: In-Memory Database
• jQuery UI: Set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library
• Amazon CloudFront
• Kafka: Distributed Messaging system
• Go: Programming language
• CentOS: Community Enterprise Operating system
• Memcached: Caching System
• Cassandra:  A partitioned row store
• Hadoop: Software for distributed computing
• Perl: Programming language
• uWSGI: Application Server Container

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2. Utilities

• Google Analytics
• Twilio SendGrid: For email delivery
• Mailgun: Email Server

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3. DevOps

• Git: Revision Control System
• Kubernetes: Manage Container of Linux System
• NewRelic: SaaS application performance management
• Kibana: Data visualization
• Grafana: Graphite & InfluxDB Dashboard and Graph Editor
• RequireJS: JavaScrip file and module loader
• HAProxy: Load Balancer
• Puppet Labs: Server automation framework
• Graphite: Real-time graphing system

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4. Business Tools

• Jira: Software development tool to plan, track and release great software.

Though looking into too many technologies seems overwhelming, you can start with the essential front-end, back-end technologies, and development tools.

Design your travel and hotel booking application

Once you’ve decided on the technology stack, start designing your application for web and mobile platforms. It is always recommended to design and develop your web application before designing a mobile app. It gives a clear picture of your mobile application design. 

Start with wireframing your application to get a clear idea about application design. Then prototype your application to get interaction with various aspects of an application.  Finally, prioritize your design concepts to achieve the desired look.

Designing an application before coding helps you to easily change and improve your design in the initial stages saving your time and money in development.

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Focus on backend development

Building a stronger back-end helps to empower your frontend as most of the UI tasks are fully dependent on the backend and some of them are, 

• API designing and documentation
• API implementation
• Building business logic
• Database retrieval and storage
• Defining permissions
• Creating test script
• Deployment

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Keep your Front-end design simple and intuitive.

Your front-end application must be clean and appealing. Here are some tips to build an amazing front-end application.

• Use professional graphics designing tools
• Keep the entire application design relevant and should match the concept.
• Ensure there are no typography errors
• Ensure relevant content should have the same design 
• Maintain Information in a hierarchical pattern
• Focus on quality rather than quantity 
• Try to match the original design and make the design pixel perfect
• Create an App landing page showcasing the value of your application and encouraging people to download it.

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Set up your analytics dashboard

Setting up an analytical dashboard helps you to study application data through visualization and customize a solution for it. Application analytics enables you to understand users’ behavior and improve application performance.

Once you have completed the entire application development, start the process of releasing your application in the marketplace. You can publish it on Google Play or another app store.

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How can you accelerate the entire process of application development?

Instead of building your travel application from scratch, you can use the software as a service platform for application development. Such platforms not only accelerate the entire software development lifecycle but also generate clean and optimized code for the application.

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DhiWise: SaaS platform for application development

DhiWise is a 100% developer-centric application development platform designed to accelerate web and mobile app development. Here are some highlights about DhiWise.

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• Supports widely used technologies for application development

DhiWise supports all the major technologies used for application development that include Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, Kotlin, Flutter, React, swift, and Laravael.

• Generates clean code faster

DhiWise helps you generate clean code faster so that developers can easily understand and improve application code while adding new features.

• Easy to collaborate, share and maintain 

Its intuitive GUI and integration with GitHub and GitLab code repositories enable developers to collaborate, maintain and share app code. 

• Ready to Deploy Features

You can generate APIs and use NPM packages, and Utilities instead of building elements from scratch to speed up your application development.

• Agile development

Get your app faster to the market, break a bigger project into apps and ensure continuous iteration with an agile development approach.

• Secure development

DhiWise ensures app security through code obfuscation, Authentication models, third-party authentication, and authorized APIs.

• Version Control

Version controls help you and your team stay on the same page and reduce rework due to errors.

• Prebuilt app templates and screen Library

DhiWise provides professionally designed app templates and a screen library so that developers do not need to start all from scratch.

To build a travel and hotel booking app use Comfort Hotel Booking App UI Kit by DhiWise and customize it according to your app development needs. 

Moreover, DhiWise has many more features such as single-click up-gradation for language versions, and module-specific access to support remote development.

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Summing Up: 

In this article, we have learned about the market stats of travel booking applications, their advantages, unique features, tech stack, and how you can accelerate app development with DhiWise. 

So, what are you waiting for? Sign Up Today and instantly generate a production-ready code for your travel booking app with DhiWise!