A development centre for Viator, a Tripadvisor company

Context

With the aim of scaling up the software development team to accelerate its product development as well as adapt quickly to the “new normal”, Viator, a Tripadvisor company, has been searching for a trusted technology partner who could help it continue to set the pace for technology innovation in the fastest-growing sector of the global travel industry.

Impressed by our BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) model, Viator has partnered with Positive Thinking Company to build up its dedicated software development centre based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

About Viator

Viator, a Tripadvisor company, is the market-leading provider for tours and activities, featuring thousands of in-destination travel activities in more than 2,000 destinations worldwide via its award-winning websites and mobile apps.

Our approach

Viator has a wide range of platforms inside its ecosystem including backend portals, e-commerce websites, business intelligence tools, and mobile apps. Viator’s software engineers work in a cloud environment of both large, complex enterprise applications and smaller micro-services. All development teams work on complete vertical slices of functionality from the front end to the database in a highly performant infrastructure, serving over 13 million visitors a month.

Therefore, Viator requires highly skilled software engineers to join its development centre in Vietnam. The team is fully equipped to be able to adapt immediately to a fast-paced global environment and not be daunted by the prospect of solving problems for millions of travellers worldwide.

We have utilised our reliable and extensive talent pool to onboard the first development team in just a few weeks. After the first three months of operation and successful deliveries, Viator decided to expand its Vietnam development centre. As a result, the team enlisted more members to continue enhancing Viator’s products and services.

Value

The Vietnam development teams have been working closely with the development and product teams of Viator in Australia, Europe, and the U.S.
Viator is applying a continuous deployment approach that allows daily product updates. The Vietnam development teams thus apply a fast-paced development approach to quickly adapt to the current workflow of Viator and be able to immediately react to end-user feedback.
The Vietnam development centre has several Scrum teams consisting of the following roles: Product Owner, Tech Lead, Full-stack Developer, QA Engineer and Development Manager.
The first development team has been working on the backend to integrate the reservation systems of hundreds of Viator’s supply partners to Viator’s booking availability and inventory systems. As data structure varies from supplier to supplier, the team has successfully implemented a generic interface to transform data to a standardised format.
The second development team is responsible for leveraging the structured data to build up a portal allowing Viator’s distribution partners to manage their programs, services, and performance conducted from its platforms in a hassle-free way.

“With industry-leading flexibility and last-minute availability, we constantly upgrade our products to not only make it easy for our customers to find and book activities but also makes it easy for the tour operators and travel agents to grow their business and reach customers worldwide.

It is essential to help our partners spend less time on micro-management and more time creating memorable moments for their customers through our system. With the maturity in setting up software development centres in Vietnam, Positive Thinking Company has quickly helped us onboard the Vietnam development team to get started in systemising our booking data and turning it into an easy-to-use portal for our partners to manage their products and performance effectively.

We are impressed with the development team in Vietnam as they are very passionate and highly experienced, and more importantly, they are fully compatible with our own internal tech culture from the very first days working with our global organisation. We have set high expectations for our Vietnam development team and can’t wait to see them grow and continue contributing to the product roadmap of Viator.”

– Paul Thomas, Director of Engineering @Viator

“Onboarding the new engineering team from Positive Thinking Company within the Viator organisation was very streamlined. I was impressed with the teams’ knowledge about agile and scrum methodologies. In addition, their pro-activeness towards onboarding and getting set-up resulted in the team being able to contribute to our business in a matter of weeks. I’m looking forward the continuation of our partnership and their contributions to our business.”

Christian Peeter - Director of Product Management, Viator
– Christian Peeter, Director of Product Management @ Viator