About Orbitz Worldwide
Orbitz Worldwide (www.orbitz.com), a brand of Travelport, Inc., is a leading online travel company offering leisure and business travelers a wide selection of low airfares, as well as deals on lodging, car rentals, cruises, vacation packages and other travel. The Orbitz Worldwide Web site was created to address consumers' need for an unbiased, comprehensive display of fares and rates in a single location.
The Challenge
To leverage Orbitz Worldwide’s efficient operating model and industry-leading online travel agency experience, the company embarked on a large initiative to build a new white label platform that would improve the “onboarding” process of new brands. Since numerous multi-national brands had different requirements, the new platform needed to be highly customizable, translated and localized, and managed through a content management system. Additionally, it needed to accommodate local legal and regulatory requirements.
The Solution
Orbitz Worldwide engaged TandemSeven to design the white label portal as well as develop a design and requirements process that could efficiently bring all future brands onto the new platform.
Since TandemSeven developed the design and documentation process that migrated CheapTickets to the Orbitz Worldwide platform, the team quickly designed and documented new wireframes and detailed specifications while following European Union accessibility guidelines. The new process can be localized to any culture or language, and conforms to priority 1 and 2 WAI guidelines.
Furthermore, the object-oriented approach easily documents configuration permutations of wireframes and specifications. The process clearly identifies content needs for the content management and Web services teams, identifies elements to be localized and how, and documents accessible rich interactions.
The Results
The self-contained modules that TandemSeven created improved Orbitz Worldwide’s development process. The flexible modules allow developers to move and reuse them with ease. Additionally, other internal teams leveraged TandemSeven’s work. The QA teams used the numbering and nomenclature to build all use cases and the CMS team used the structure and documentation to build out their taxonomy.
The first brand to “onboard” the Orbitz Worldwide platform was ebookers.com, a full-service travel site in Europe. The site was recently launched at www.ebookers.com. As a result of the initiative, Orbitz Worldwide expects to experience efficient and streamlined “onboarding” of additional brands and decreased operating costs as each brand comes on-line. |
