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Porter

Situation

Porter Travel aimed to disrupt the standard, overwhelming online travel agency (OTA) experience by building a personalized hotel booking and recommendation engine. The original application, built on legacy frameworks (Slim PHP, Angular), lacked the scalability, maintainability, and feature-set needed to fully implement their sophisticated recommendation logic and manage multi-source API data.

Task

Our team was tasked with modernizing the core application, migrating the backend and frontend to modern frameworks (Laravel and React, respectively), and integrating two major hotel APIs (HotelBeds and Booking.com) to provide a seamless, personalized booking journey for customers.

Action

  • Led the strategic migration of the core application from Slim PHP to Laravel, establishing a more robust, maintainable, and scalable backend architecture.
  • Integrated two major external hotel booking APIs (HotelBeds and Booking.com) to aggregate hotel inventory and availability data, managing complex data normalization from both sources.
  • Developed custom business logic to create user profiles and a recommendation engine that filtered and ranked hotels to solve the “choice paralysis” problem for customers.
  • Engineered a split checkout workflow: direct booking integration for HotelBeds properties versus a seamless hand-off experience for Booking.com properties.
  • Assisted with the frontend transition from Angular to React, working as a full-stack developer to ensure smooth communication and data handling between the new Laravel API and the modern React user interface.

Result

Delivered a fully modernized, full-stack booking and recommendation engine that directly addressed the client’s business challenge. The technical migration and API integrations provided a stable platform capable of handling vast inventory. This personalized approach positioned Porter Travel to offer a unique, high-value user experience and directly compete in the crowded OTA market.