Section 12.1. A Motivating Example: Travel Agent Web Services

12.1. A Motivating Example: Travel Agent Web Services

This section uses a fictional travel agency to illustrate some of these concepts. Figure 12-2 depicts the scenario described in this section. The Fabrikam456 Travel Agency offers air, hotel, and car-rental services to its customers through several different business portals. In turn, Fabrikam456 uses Web services to interact with travel suppliers such as hotel chains and airlines.

Figure 12-2. Travel agency scenario.

CompanyABC is one of Fabrikam456's clients, allowing its employees to arrange travel through Fabrikam456. In some instances, the employees are traveling and are outside CompanyABC's network. These employees have a laptop/notebook application that uses Web services to interact directly with Fabrikam456 over the Internet. At other times, the employees are on site and use a CompanyABC application, which in turn uses Web services to interact with Fabrikam456.

Fabrikam456 would like to offer an integrated set of services to its customers. The idea is this: A requester submits a single travel request, listing cities and dates. Fabrikam456 responds with an itinerary containing reservations for the hotels, airlines, and vehicles. Fabrikam456 wants the flexibility to extend these services for certain partners based on a variety of criteria (gold service, preferred customers, and so on), and to allow customers to specify certain preferences (aisle seats on planes, nonsmoking rooms, and so on). Finally, many suppliers of travel services have direct relationships with customers, such as frequent flier programs. Customers should be able to exploit these programs when booking through Fabrikam456.