Partner Widget 2.0
After four years of successful use, we were able to completely revise the partner widget for HolidayCheck and add a new feature. In addition to the consistent implementation of the corporate design, which had been changed in the meantime, and the improvement of the presentation through responsive web design, a reminder service by e-mail for hotel guests was added.
The Partner Widget is a B2B application. As the leading provider of hotel ratings in German-speaking countries, HolidayCheck AG makes its enormous database available to tour operators who are partners of the company via REST API. The original aim of the project (in 2014) was to offer partners an easier way to integrate the database into their websites without having to program their own connections to the REST interface.
The Drupal framework proved to be a highly flexible all-rounder: Drupal itself only stores the data about the partners (permissions, settings and output styles). When the partner widget is called up, Drupal communicates via the internal HTTP client with the Holiday-Check API to then display the requested information as an HTML document.
Components
The partner widget provides two parts: the view of hotel reviews (and media, if applicable) and the review section for submitting hotel reviews. HolidayCheck partners can integrate both parts as ready-made HTML into their websites and stores, either as a pop-up window or via iframe. The selection of the partner and the hotel to be displayed is controlled by the URL: one parameter defines the partner, the other the hotel for which information is to be displayed.
We have now completely revised the view of the hotel reviews, adapted it to HolidayCheck's corporate design and optimized the display of the partner widget for all conceivable devices (responsive web design).
When submitting hotel reviews, the data is first entered and validated by Drupal in just a few steps using an optimized form. If the data is all valid, it is then sent to HolidayCheck via POST call by the internal HTTP client to the REST API. The form has been revised to meet today's requirements (mobile devices) and greatly simplified to improve the conversion rate.
Drupal module programming: Interface to the API
A specially programmed module makes the requests to the HolidayCheck API. The data record for the requested hotel is retrieved and prepared for output by Drupal. Since calls to the API and the preparation cost resources and, above all, time, a caching mechanism is integrated into the module. The retrieved hotel information can be cached for a freely definable period of time.
Tracking of views and rating submissions
Another Drupal module, which was created for the HolidayCheck Partner Widget, is used to track visits. The calls to the partner widget are recorded for each individual partner so that the use of the service can be evaluated. Separately, it also logs how many reviews were started and how many were actually submitted via the API. The entire logged data can be exported as a CSV file for further processing and archiving.