Wanderift is a groundbreaking company that offers one of the world’s first membership-based airline travel booking platforms. Their platform requires members to pay a sub¬scription fee in exchange for a certain number of tokens. Each token can be used to purchase a one-way flight to any domestic location. This is an innovative approach to air travel booking, therefore Wanderift deemed that they must have a custom-made website that will accommodate their unique business model.
Wanderift is a cloud-based platform that offers membership-based airline ticket and travel bookings. Wanderift does not rely on the traditional model of placing a monetary price on flights. Members subscribe in exchange for “tokens”, each token is equivalent to a single one-way flight to any domestic location. Because of this business format, we took a custom and unique approach. Not only did our developers account for and strategize exchange of tokens, but also integrated with airlines, for ticket information, times, and locations, as well as ensure the large amounts of data load seamless¬ly.
In our first meeting with the Wanderift team, we discussed the scope of their project, their timeline, marketing, and features. As with any of our projects, the first step was doing our research. We worked closely with their team to determine what design aspects would be necessary to optimize the performance of their custom web application.
The desired timeline and potential scope of the app project was one year. The app would be built from the ground up by our team. Since nothing like Wanderift had existed, their team needed to capitalize and leverage as many marketing channels as possible. For this reason, we also built out an accompanying static website for marketing.
The most important features and factors in our development are:
1. Responsive Design
2. Stripe API
3. Integration with airline flight data from American Airlines, Delta, Frontier, Jetblue, and Southwest
4. Built a subscription model or flight tickets
5. Advanced route planning algorithm for flight destinations
Traveling is already so frustrating and stressful, we needed to ensure that the product was UI/UX optimized. To guarantee that first-time visitors could quickly understand the product, we used React to develop the user interface. This choice was made because the dynamic frontend solutions within React’s library are perfect for creating an intuitive, easy to navigate user interface. The UI elements were custom designed in adobe creative suite and front-end features were built with React. Stripe, a payment processing service, was integrated for easy transaction processing.
In regard to the backend development of Wanderift’s booking platform, our team determined that the web app would need to be developed using a fully customizable framework. We chose the .NET Framework and developed the platform in C#, as these allowed us the most security and functionality. Flexibility was vital, because we integrated the platform with major airlines such as American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Delta, Frontier and JetBlue. We integrated the flights and routes into our database allowing us to create a booking process that takes under 20 seconds. With this data our team developed an algorithm that would compare route options for the users’ specified destination. SQL server was used for the database, sim¬plifying large-scale data management. Interconnected with the transaction flow, and Stripe API, we developed their subscription model.
One of the biggest challenges our team would face while developing was communicating with and relaying information from the different airlines in real time. We overcame this hurdle by incorporating flight data into our database. End solution allowed for users to search, book, and redeem tokens in exchange for airline tickets.
Every endpoint and function was rigorously tested to ensure the security and integrity of the product.
The end solution of our work was a flight booking web app that allows users to book flights using a to¬ken-based system. This was paired with a basic, static webpage that was used for marketing purposes leading up to their full product launch.
The Wanderift team says, “Nexrage Studios has been a great solution to Wanderift for custom software development. The team is second to none, and their attention to detail is fantastic. I highly recommend to any startup or company looking for software solutions.” Regarding our work on their business.