Zimma Web Development

We’ve recently been working on a couple of projects that involve integrating hotel deals using the Laterooms affiliate program. This allows websites to offer hotel deals to their visitors and earn a slice of commission in the process.

TheTicketSellers

When an order is made on TheTicketSellers website the customer receives email confirmation and we spent some time rejigging this recently to provide the customer with more useful information. It seemed like the perfect place to include hotel listings as we know the customer is going to a particular event and we know where the event is so we can offer them deals on hotels near the event.

We ran into a couple of problems along the way.

The largest problem was that the XML feed provided by Laterooms that gives us all the latest prices can be unreliable. Expecting it to be available every time an order confirmation is sent would not be a good idea. So, we grab all the info early in the morning, store in a database and it can then be used throughout the rest of the day.

As we are relating the hotels to an event we needed to work out which hotels were close to the venue at which the event is being held. Whilst Laterooms provide the longitude and latitude of every hotel, we only have the postcode for the venue so a little bit of translation is needed to get a similar value for the hotel. We then use a long formula (essentially Pythagorean theorem adjusted to account for the curvature of the earth) to calculate the distances between the two points. This allows us to list all the hotels in order of how far they are from the venue.

Visit North West

Visit North West is a tourist information site for, you guessed it, the north west. Zimma recenlty helped them with their Laterooms hotel integrations so they had more flexibility and more efficient scripts.

Previously they were running off the Laterooms XML feed which meant page load times could be painful especially on pages that list hundreds of hotels.

Now, by using the database buffering technique used in TheTicketSellers example, it can serve the hotels without having to access the XML all the time or worry about whether the XML is available or not.

VNW also use their own hotel descriptions (as opposed to those provided by Laterooms) and combine this with information from the Laterooms CSV. Zimma set them up with a control panel that allows them to upload their own CSV files and Laterooms CSV files so they can serve information about the hotels from all three sources at once.

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If you have a website which you think would benefit from listing tempting hotel deals and make money along the way then get in touch to see how we can help. We also offer restaurant and cinema listings integration services.

TheTicketSellers.co.uk is an online ticket agency. Their online presence has grown tremendously since the first version of website in 2006 and sells tickets for a wide range of events from Drum & Bass Arena to Moseley Folk Festival.

The people at TheTicketSellers are always willing to incorporate new ideas and technology to make sure the customers and promoters that use their services are always very happy.

This website is much more than a website and is probably better descibed as a system. I’m going to break it down into the three types of user so you can a better idea of what I have built for them.

CUSTOMERS - The people who buy the tickets

TheTicketSellers site makes it very simple for customers to purchase tickets. Here are a few of the best features:

• Predictive search feature which suggests events as you type
• SMS e-ticket delivery. Customers can have their e-tickets sent to their mobile by text message.
• Customer account area where customers can log in check delivery status on their open orders and check past orders.

PROMOTERS - The people who have the tickets to sell

Promoters have their login area of the site where they can

• add new events
• manage their existing events
• check on ticket sales
• check graphical statistics about their customers
• print out their e-ticket doorlist at the end of the event
• create links and buttons for their events
• update their public profile and payment preferences

STAFF - The people who sell the tickets

TheTicketSellers also have a 24 hour phone line and all orders taken over the phone are made through a staff control panel. This control panel also allows the staff to manage

• user accounts
• past orders
• venues and events
• invoice generation
• paper ticket postage
• banner adverts