AIDA Cruises is a brand of the cruise company Carnival Corporation & plc specifically for the German target group. In 1996, it said "Cast off!" for the first time. Since then, the company has revolutionised the German cruise market with the idea of offering cruises as a modern lifestyle product. At the time of project realisation, the 13 ships in the AIDA fleet can accommodate up to 30,460 guests.
AIDA offers a separate area for travel sellers on the aida.de website. Travel agencies that sell AIDA voyages can log in here and manage their bookings, for example. In addition, AIDA provides a media centre with images, route maps, forms and social media templates for the agencies to use for their sales and daily work.
During the revision of the extranet for travel agents - also known as EXPInet - the media centre was also improved and adapted to the new layout. Previously, the search and results list was implemented as an extension in TYPO3. The AIDA search was used as an interface to the search server and the AIDA media centre as a link between the search server and the user interface.
The progress of the project and the next steps were discussed with the customer in weekly reviews. This meant that the client was always informed about the progress of the project and we were able to align our activities with the client's current priorities in an agile manner.
We decided to implement the front-end layout in Vue.js. By separating the frontend and backend, we have the advantage of greater flexibility. In order to fulfil our own requirement for automated integration tests, we have integrated corresponding tests for the media library into the AIDA Jenkins Blue Ocean environment. These primarily test the most important functions of the new media library (filtering, accessibility, shopping basket). In this way, we show the customer that we not only promise automatic testing and quality assurance, but also deliver it.
The atmosphere during the course of the project and during the reviews was consistently positive. The open and transparent co-operation ensured a very relaxed project process on both sides. One positive aspect was that we planned the schedulable campaigns feature in particular from the outset in such a way that new ideas and deviations from the initial requirement could be integrated into the existing concept without any problems.
The development of the backend component was implemented in the form of a new TYPO3 extension that performs the queries 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 improved. It offers significantly more options for applying new search criteria. AIDA also wanted a solution that would work independently of TYPO3. We were also able to fulfil this project in full. Another important requirement was to make the EXPInet media library compatible with IE11, as this is still used by many agencies.
