What is under the hood of travel startups or why does a programmer need to go to Hack`n`Roll

On November 26, the “TravelTech: prospects for online services” conference was held, where experts from the travel industry tried to figure out what was happening in the market.



At first I had the opinion that all travel startups are just interface wrappers and a lot of PR, but I spoke with Roman Spiridonov (CTO Excursopedia) and he opened my eyes to open source, efficient search algorithms and fraud in the field of travel projects.
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On December 4-6, Moscow will host Hack'n'Roll (such as a hackathon), where it will be possible to demonstrate its programming skills and take part in the development of online services in Russia.

Under the cut - what challenges and opportunities there are for programmers of the travel segment.

Frode

While Palantir is not freely available, everyone is fighting fraud as they can.



Travel is generally very susceptible to fraud crimes, so as soon as the company reaches a more or less decent level, it takes tremendous efforts to combat fraud.

Here is an AirBnb presentation about fraud real time detection.

Here is a professional fraud scenario with airline tickets.

And even symposia collect - 4th Annual Travel Industry Fraud Event - Travel Fraud Prevention Symposium 2016 .

Meta search engines tickets

A significant part of the work in these projects consists in optimizing (caching) requests to GDS / agents, while providing the client with real ticket prices.

You can read about the internal kitchen in an interview with Artem Konovalov, the founder of Corner (a flight search startup):

- What is the difference between a metasearch and an agent? The agent is also looking for tickets.
- The agent can accept money, but the meta search engine does not. When a person, for example, says that he bought his Aviasales ticket, then from a technical point of view this is not true. Because he bought a ticket from an agent, where he was sent by Aviasales or any other metasearch. The agent also accepted the money for the ticket. He is responsible for it. Corner is a meta search engine.

We have no commission, because we do not make money on agency commissions, like the same Skyscanner, Momondo. We earn on commissions from Automated Booking Systems (CRS, they are also GDS, global distribution system), because unlike others, we search for tickets not through agents, but directly through GDS. It is very important to share. The agent pays us nothing, your order is free for him.

We have a good bet, because the way we look for tickets, no one in the world has ever done.

- Brave claim. What is the difference, for example, Corner from Skyscanner?
- Suppose, in theory, Skyscanner is connected to three agents OneTwoTrip, Tripsta, Tiket.ru.
Skyscanner sends each request: "Give me Moscow-Paris prices for February 3."
Total, it turns out three requests to agents.

Those in turn make exactly the same requests to the GDS servers. Well this is pure load animation! And if the agents are 15 and more, then the load increases to the skies. This is stupid!
Corner does one ONE request to the GDS. Compare the search speed with us and others. You will not be surprised. You will be surprised how Corner instantly switches to search results.

We, without false modesty, were the first in the world to take data from the GDS directly, and then only to interview agents:
“Agents, we have tickets Moscow – Paris for February 3 and we know their price in the GDS. How much are you ready to write to our users? ”

Full interview here .

Open source

Standards are a headache in trevel. If for air tickets and hotels with standards it is gradually getting better and better, then in Travel activities there is still nothing similar to the general standards. There is an organization that seriously deals with standards - this is opentravel.org . The list of member companies of this organization is impressive.


Travel projects that are fully open source

• github.com/opentripplanner - open route planner
• wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page - crowdsourced travel guide. Uses an open engine MediaWiki
• github.com/zaknelson/hike.io - service for hiking enthusiasts

Practically any serious company has a set of small open source projects / libraries that can be both highly specialized and targeted at the masses. Here are some of the profiles of such companies:

• github.com/airbnb
• github.com/uber
• github.com/ExpediaDotCom
• github.com/KosyanMedia (Aviasales)
• github.com/Hipmunk
• github.com/rome2rio

Also, many projects have a public API that allows you to use the capabilities of services.

A little more about open source AirBnB

List of open source projects from AirBnB .

Airpal is a web application for working with SQL (based on Facebook's Presto).
Created with an eye on users who are not technical experts. However, we wanted to give them a tool that allows them to fully work with data arrays, and at the same time help professionals improve the efficiency of the analysis.
Article on Habré
Airpal on github

Airflow is a document management platform.
Airflow on github

Aerosolve is a machine-based dynamic pricing system. As a result - the increase in income of hosters by 20-40%.
Article on Habré Secrets of the Airbnb Pricing Algorithm
Aerosolve on Github


This software will help homeowners to increase profits by 20-40%. They will be able to increase the cost of renting during the high season and reduce tariffs with decreasing demand. The PriceMethod algorithm is based on data collection and analysis of information on more than 500 million parameters.


The algorithm uses rental price statistics to group proposed positions into microclusters by degree of similarity.

Meanwhile, Airbnb is looking for talented programmers around the world.
According to Mike Curtis (Mike Curtis), vice president of technology at Airbnb, who previously held the post of technology director at Facebook, the opening of the product code allows you to attract talented engineers to the company: Now there is a crazy competition for the best engineers, so the more we can demonstrate, the more chances we have to get the best specialists. ” Mike added: “If you post something that helps companies move forward, it inspires people who are familiar with the technical problems we solve in Airbnb. Perhaps they will think so that we are waiting for them to work with us. ”

And sensible programmers from Moscow, with arms out of their shoulders, will be able to “practice on cats” this week.

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Rosturizm launches the National Tourism Portal (NTP) - a project of federal scale. NTP is actively developing and is designed to stimulate domestic and inbound tourism, providing access to extensive information on sights, historical and cultural features, etc.

The API has been specifically designed for the NTP, with which this information can be applied in its own projects under the terms of using open data.

What you need to do
Come on December 4th with your project or join the team. Get an introduction to the challenges facing the tourism industry. To propose a solution and prove in 3 days that it is viable.

The main task : to take the API and find it the most effective application to travel around Russia has become easier, more comfortable and more interesting.

For whom it will be useful:

• Startups who want to get a strong ally in the face of Rostourism.
• Those who are ready to make a travel ‑ startup and are waiting for a sign from above. Actually, here it is, this sign.
• Experts in the field of development, marketing, design and business development who want to learn how it works in a startup.