TripPlanner, the system behind our ticket prices. And more

What is TripPlanner?

TripPlanner is the internal IT system behind KLM.com's price tooling. When someone looks for a flight online, the price information they see comes from TripPlanner. In fact, all data from pricing, network and seat availability come together here and generate price information for the customer.

The how and why of TripPlanner

In the past, we depended solely on external systems for price information for our flights, which made adding new functionalities to our website very difficult. TripPlanner has made this easier because it allows for new ways of calculating the flight price. As an example, TripPlanner made it possible to introduce continuous pricing in our offer whichallows us to create more price points then the traditional methods. This gives the customer the best possible price.

We built our services in C# and C++, and sometimes we use some Python. When you have an affinity with development, but in business analytics as well, feel free to reach out to us! Although TripPlanner is a critical system, you don’t need years of experience, you will learn a lot on the job. Like with our regular knowledge sharing sessions, we make sure we share best practices and learn from each other.

The impact of TripPlanner on the KLM operation

Thanks to this system, we are much faster and more flexible in supplying price information than before. We provide price information to many of our online sales channels, such as the Air France or KLM website, NDC, metasearch parties such as SkyScanner and Kayak, and advertisements on, for example, Google and campaign pages.

Our future challenges in TripPlanner

We handle millions of requests to the API, webservices and the many (batch) processes, we currently use more than a hundred servers. This impacts the environment. That’s why we set up green KPIs for ourselves to commit to and transfer part of the application to the Microsoft Azure cloud. That’s more dynamic, more flexible and more sustainable.

What’s it like to work on TripPlanner?

Our team is very dedicated and passionate who also like to socialize together. We plan team events like sports, hiking trips, boardgame nights as often as possible! We have around 20 people divided in 4 teams working daily on the various aspects of TripPlanner.

The technology we use makes the work very enjoyable. We build our applications on ​​C++/C# and they run on Windows servers. We use MongoDB as a cache to store some pricing information; this ensures faster response times which is super important to us! Besides that we use real-time messaging which controls seat availability updates. We also focus more on R&D. How can we find new methods to calculate the correct pricing? Where do we see new possibilities for our services? We actively discuss this with our users and that’s where the analytical skills of the team are very valuable. Ultimately, we want to offer more products and services to our passengers.