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Customer Story

Google Cloud Platform Keeps Omio Travelers Up-To-Date

The online journey planner streamlined user experience, creating a single backend that enabled updates to be instantly shared
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Related services
Cloud, Digital Transformation, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Industry
Travel | Hospitality

Company
Xebia

Omio (previously known as GoEuro) helps customers find and book tickets for travel by train, bus, and flight across Europe. Using Omio, travelers can decide on the best transport option for their needs from over a thousand providers, based on duration, price or mode, instead of having to visit multiple websites to plan a trip. The booking experience is simple and personalized, and is available across all digital channels, including a free mobile app alongside mobile and desktop websites. In addition to booking, Omio provides a price comparison website, an online travel magazine, in-app journey updates and contactless ticketing. Today, the company has more than twenty-seven million monthly users, with 70% of traffic from mobile alone.
Why
Omio wanted to improve UX design to provide immediate push notifications to users
What
Utilizing Google Cloud, the company integrated all platforms within the same infrastructure
How
Performance of Omio apps was enhanced, with cost and scale benefits a big bonus for the company’s future

Cloud Platform Needed to Unify Apps

As part of a continued strategy of innovation, Omio wanted to enhance the user experience of the most important component: the mobile app. The app was already a source of crucial travel information for users, with departure information, journey details and reports of delays and alterations all accessible within it. To add further value, the company wanted to find a way to provide this information to users’ mobile devices in real-time, without opening the app.

Therefore, Omio wanted to unify its mobile platforms via the backend so that instant notifications, along with faster feature updates, could be implemented in unison. For this, the company needed to build a cloud-hosted infrastructure.

Google Cloud Backend Enables Notifications

Omio’s solution was to redo the mobile application’s system logic and create an infrastructure that worked universally across every platform, be it iOS, Android or desktop. After consultation with Xebia, Google Firebase was chosen as most suited for the cloud-hosted infrastructure, so the two companies got to work on cross-platform app development together.

Push notifications from the new integration would be triggered by regular updates from Omio’s travel partners, with only the updates relevant to a user’s trip being notified to them. As it no longer uses individual user requests as the trigger, the number of information requests to partners would be reduced, saving costs. Thanks to the cloud-hosted infrastructure, any feature updates for the apps would be transmitted simultaneously across all mobile platforms immediately upon release.

“Working with Xebia to optimize our infrastructure has proven very successful. Their nearly decade-long experience with the cloud means we have a future-proof and scalable solution with a backend integrated across all platforms. Now, our customers enjoy live updates and the latest features anytime and on any device.”
Omio Logo
Moiz Zuberi Senior Engineering Manager, Omio.

Mobile App Upgrades “On the Move”

After completing the new, highly-optimized infrastructure, Omio was able to provide a much-improved user experience.

App users benefit from mobile push notifications for any updates made to their trips as they travel. They also now get faster access to all the latest app features, with new versions developed twice as fast thanks to Firebase, and rolled out to all within ten minutes of release. With three hundred new microservices within the architecture, the apps now perform better than ever.

In addition, Omio has reduced some costs thanks to the new platform, as it only sends a third of the queries that it did to partners. Utilizing the cloud means the apps are now scalable, allowing for demand changes, meaning Omio is better prepared as its business evolves.

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