ESB for 230 airlines based on BizTalk Server

Challenge

To connect the proprietary reservation systems of its 230 airline customers to the global distribution systems (GDS, e.g. Amadeus) on the one hand and 85,000 IATA travel agencies on the other, Hahn Air made the strategic decision to implement an enterprise service bus based on Microsoft BizTalk Server. This would completely support the synchronous interfaces that complex reservation scenarios require today.

Solution

The QUIBIQ solution based on BizTalk Server 2010 and ESB Toolkit 2.1 support the synchronous interfaces that complex reservation scenarios require today in a completely transactional way. For example, if a travel agency employee makes a query in the reservation system, the system shows in real time whether a seat is available at a certain price. The system temporarily blocks this offer and immediately issues a reservation and a ticket upon confirmation by the customer. In the new system, such a synchronous transaction may only last a maximum of two seconds. In this time, the message is sent once from the GDS to the ESB, which forwards it to the relevant customer partition in the central system aergo Inventory before the response is then displayed again in the GDS via the same route.

Advantages for Hahn Air

The solution saves time – and therefore money: "With BizTalk Server 2010, we can link reservation and check-in systems in two weeks. Until now, project durations of months and years were usual in the industry", explains Celia Roser, Head of Operations, Hahn Air Systems.

And the processing speed has also increased. "If we use BizTalk Server 2010 in combination with the new Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, the processing for our users speeds up by about 25%," says Dr. Hensel, Project Manager, Hahn Air Systems.