One of the first projects I had working in the Travel industry is building the HotelClub engine which can be used for multiple clients. The concept is to build a site that connects to the HotelClub API, bring back the data and present it to the customers – allowing them to book rooms in real time. The screenshots below is for Wells Fargo Rewards – which uses the new api. My role was a developer – in a team of three.

Search

The first part of the process is to fetch the Hotels in the area. So naturally, there is a search form with location and dates for the rooms.

This search form is also available throughout the process, just in case the user wants to modify the parameters of their search. The results can be sorted and filtered with the hotel’s meta data. From within the tile is more information about the hotel, as well as the rate for the room available.

Paging, sort and map views are also available in the search results. All user interactivity is done through JavaScript accessing the Hotelclub API in the backend.

Hotel and Room Details

One of the views that the engine has is the hotel and rooms. This is where another call is done to the API, grabbing the list of available rooms for the specific hotel.

As you can tell from below, the Wells Fargo branding is applied.

Additional views such as map and tabbed description, amenities also come in the hotel detail. A photo gallery with the hotel’s best photo is also included in the interface.

This was written in PHP, with an MVC framework called Zend Framework. The project allowed me to gain experience with MVC and Object Oriented programming. It was also my first experience working with public facing API’s.

.

Working with others had also given me plenty of insight on how web applications with multiple developers is really like. Our PM had us on a tight deadline, so we had to work with an agile environment with sprints and daily stand ups. Code was kept in a version control system called subversion.