Odysseus Solutions
Odysseus: Designing Innovative Travel Booking Engines

Odysseus Solutions is a Miami based Travel Technology Company providing the most comprehensive and innovative online booking solutions available in the market today. The travel industry has been riding the momentum of e-commerce as more people are relying on the internet for booking their hotels and flights. “However, a lot of companies are still using Booking Engines built on legacy technology, which does not allow them to easily add new content or make simple changes to their User Interface,” says Monish Luthra, President & CEO, Odysseus Solutions.

Odysseus Solutions was founded in 2005 to fill the industry need for an online travel booking engine that automates processes and is easily customized to support a client’s unique requirements and brand identity. As company Founder, Luthra organized a working group of developers, suppliers and travel agents and used a collaborative approach to design and develop the ultimate travel booking solution. The result was the Odysseus Booking Engine, one of the most complete and advanced online travel booking engines available today. Fully customizable, this Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C) application helps automate processes and increase revenues while it reduces the time and effort required to complete a transaction.

The Odysseus Air, Cruise and Hotel Booking Engines are hosted by Odysseus with the headers, footers and style sheets customized to provide a seamless online experience. Complete private label versions are also supported where Odysseus can change the layout to meet a specific brand requirement.

The Odysseus Air Booking Engine provides “Live” access to airline content to be sure the most up to date availability and pricing is used. The Air Booking Engine even has the ability to simultaneously search multiple content sources for the best price. Revenue Management Tools include the ability to adjust a product’s selling price and there is even an optional feature to run fraud checks or inform clients if their credit card is declined.

Our Air XML has been integrated by some of the large metasearch engines because of its live connection functionality

The Odysseus Air XML option is a “smart” API that provides much more than a simple “live” connection to check airline pricing & availability or to book a flight. This innovative product allows clients to take advantage of the powerful business logic and processing capabilities of the Odysseus Air Booking Engine while customizing the Look & Feel of their User Interface at their own convenience. Customers can host all air booking User Interfaces on their own servers while using the Odysseus Air XML for business logic as well as live pricing, availability & booking. This simple XML interface can also combine multiple sources into a single interface, eliminating the need to maintain multiple connections. “Our Air XML has also been integrated by some of the large metasearch engines because of its live connection functionality,” says Luthra.

“It’s not the features but rather our relationship with the clients, which has given Odysseus the most success stories,” adds Luthra. For example, one of the company’s clients was live with a metasearch engine for flights, but Users were being redirected to a results page instead of the actual booking process. After a discussion with the client about low conversion rates, Odysseus implemented a new process to improve the user booking experience which more than doubled the conversion rate.

Odysseus applications are designed to meet the unique requirements of clients globally and can easily handle multiple currencies as well as multiple languages. Plans for the future include a steady growth in customers and support staff, continued enhancements of existing products as well as launching new products and services that customers are looking for.