airline direct

airline direct is one of the best-known online travel and Internet-provider portals of the first wave. Now over a decade in the business, the portal has offered users and clients the possibility to make their own online bookings for flights, holidays and hotels since 1999. For five years airline direct also offered its own, house-designed, web solutions. But in early 2008 the portal's operator, Travel Viva AG, decided to replace their, equally in-house designed and developed Web Content Management System with a stable and license-free Open Source CMS based on TYPO3.

Travel Viva AG runs the online travel portal airline direct, which works with selected partners and travel agencies. Because travelers book their own trip, the online portal saves costs and is able to deliver at an advantageous price to the customer. With a current offer of more than 3.5 million tariffs from leading airlines, as well as the entire range of flights available from low-cost airlines, it has become the leading provider of flights over the Internet. To top this, customers of the portal can choose between more than 100,000 offers of flights, rental cars and holidays from every price class. This gives the highest priority to the search mask and its related choice options.

This was the reason why, when AOE media installed the new TYPO3-based Web Content Management system, particular attention was given to the intuitive functioning of the integrated search mask and its seamless connection to the airline direct booking system. By using AJAX technology the user is already given practical suggestions on choice of airports, stopovers etc. while entering the search details. This is particularly helpful, for example, if you didn't know that a particular city has more than one airport, or whether your airline of choice actually flies there. In addition, and depending on the type of trip or transport, customers can trim their search options exactly to suit their needs.

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Just for the package trips the service offers the traveler 19 main choices with 15 variants to choose from. Integrated into the TYPO3 Frontend, the search mask is connected to airline direct's booking system in the Backend via a custom extension. Thanks to some very clean programming, this extension is always able to display the most up-to-date information from the Backend, even when the site is being bombarded with visitors, such as can occur at the opening of a special offer. While making the TYPO3 conversion, the design of the web portal was also updated. It is now markedly fresher and snappier than the old version. This is in part due to the use of numerous, specially-programmed TYPO3 templates within the more content-heavy sections of the portal, such as "Advice and Services" or "Contact and Help".