Results@Five Star Alliance

Quoin collaborated with the client to refine system requirements and site design

We built a user-oriented and feature-rich site for searching, browsing, and booking hotels

Site exhibits outstanding performance for searching and booking

Site consistently has excellent ranking in the major search engines

Client quickly established itself as a market leader within its first year of operations

We continue to be engaged by Five Star Alliance to define and implement new features

Technologies

J2EE - Java Server Pages, Java Servlets, Java Domain Objects, XHTML, XML Apache Cocoon, Apache Lucene, Jakarta Tomcat, PostgreSQL, JUnit, JMeter, Apache Ant, CVS

Projects

Quoin has extensive experience building systems for advertising, content management, e-commerce, finance, online media, and publishing. We have a track record of successful development and system integration projects – delivering innovative solutions on time, on budget, and on target for our clients.

Atom Entertainment
Health Central Network
One System User's Group
Revlon
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Five Star Alliance: Online Luxury Hotel Reservation System

Quoin built a sophisticated e-commerce site for Five Star Alliance, an online service to search and book luxury hotel travel. We collaborated with the client to produce a site that exhibits extraordinary reliability, performance and usability. The key features of the site include intuitive tools for searching luxury hotels by name, location, features, and amenities. The Apache Cocoon-based site exhibits extraordinary performance. A search requires less than 0.9 seconds, even under significant load of concurrent users. We achieved this result through disciplined testing and optimization of each process. Our project team worked with the client to implement a range of techniques for search engine optimization, including generating metadata from dynamic page content, creating search results pages which can be cached, and using simple static URIs to support page indexing. A key part of the system architecture was integration with a third-party information service, which required use of an XML-based API for requesting hotel information, rates, and reservations. To ensure a reliable online service, the workflow design and implementation had to anticipate a range of error scenarios, including network and booking process failures. The 20-week project demonstrated our capability to provide on-time delivery of a fixed-cost project.

“As a start-up, we needed an engaging web site to launch our business. Quoin brought its broad experience in ecommerce design and engineering to create a remarkable site. We believe that the outstanding work done by the project team was a significant contribution to our success. Quoin simply builds great software.”

– Jay Ashton, President, Five Star Alliance

Quoin continues to implement enhancements, conduct training, and provide ongoing technology support for this system. We recently implemented a "Browse by Destination" module for location-centric listing of hotels. Our support team also helped to implement a hotel mapping feature using the Google Maps API.

Online Luxury Hotel Reservation System