AIDA Cruises is a brand of the cruise company Carnival Corporation & plc and especially aimed at the German target group. The beginnings started in 1996. Since then, the company has revolutionized the German cruise market with the concept of offering cruises as a modern lifestyle product. At the time of project implementation, the total of 13 ships in the AIDA fleet can accommodate up to 30,460 guests..
Countries
40
Employees
> 11,000 worldwide
Revenue
> 1.5 billion €
The plan
AIDA offers a dedicated section for travel agencies on the aida.de website. Among other things, travel agencies selling AIDA trips can log in to the site and manage bookings. In addition, AIDA provides images, route maps, forms and social media templates in a media library (Mediathek) for the agencies who can use the resources for their sales and daily work.
During the revision of the extranet for expeditors - also known as the EXPInet, the media library was also improved and adapted to the new layout. So far, the search and result list was implemented as an extension in TYPO3. The AIDA search was used as the interface to the search server and the AIDA media library as the link between the search server and the user interface.
Implementation
The progress of the project and the next steps were discussed with the customer in weekly reviews. This ensured that the client was always informed about the progress of the project and we were able to align our activities in an agile manner based on the customer's current priorities.
We decided to implement the frontend layout in Vue.js. Separating the frontend and backend gives the advantage of greater flexibility. In order to meet our own requirements for automated integration tests, we created corresponding tests in the AIDA Jenkins Blue Ocean environment for the media library. These test the most important functions of the new media library (filters, availability, shopping cart). In this way we show the customer that we not only promise automatic testing and quality assurance, but also deliver it.
The mood during the course of the project and during the reviews was consistently positive. The open and transparent cooperation allowed for a very smooth project flow on both sides. One highlight was the fact that we planned the feature for scheduled campaigns in such a way that later ideas and deviations from the initial requirement could easily be integrated into the existing setup.
"Thanks to the agile implementation, we were able to repeatedly review our original project assumptions from sprint to sprint and react to changed requirements without exceeding the given budget."
Tobias Hein
Head of DXP
Netresearch
Impressions
Key features
| Project completion within budget and expected time of the customer | ||
| Implementation of the new layout | ||
| Adoption of the previous filter functions & faceting of the search results | ||
| Enrich route maps with metadata for better filtering and display | ||
| Make media for scheduled campaigns available in the search for the period of the campaign | ||
| Deeplink capability for filters and search results | ||
| Generation of preview images for various document types (PDF, Doc, etc.) | ||
| Ensuring project quality with integration tests | ||
| Implementation of all features of the backlog | ||
The result
The development of the backend component was implemented as a new TYPO3 extension that carries out the requests against the Solr search server and prepares them in JSON format for the frontend.
By replacing the GSA Search with Solr, the quality of the search results has greatly improved. It offers significantly more options for applying new search criteria. AIDA also aimed for a solution that works independently of TYPO3. We were also able to fully implement this as well. The requirement to make the EXPInet media library compatible with IE11 was also important, as this is still used by many agencies.
Thomas Wilhelm
Consultant web platforms,
CMS, TYPO3
+49 341 47842241
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