Architecture Case Study
Transition Approach
A staged path for introducing live holiday search alongside existing website journeys.
Transition principle
Live holiday search can be introduced as a bounded capability alongside existing catalogue-based journeys rather than forcing the whole travel platform into one integration model.
Stage 1 — Establish the integration contract
Define and validate:
- customer search inputs;
- internal request model;
- supplier mapping;
- normalised website response;
- error categories.
Stage 2 — Integrate the Webflow search experience
Connect Webflow search controls to the backend contract while keeping supplier protocol concerns behind the service boundary.
Stage 3 — Introduce result presentation
Render normalised holiday results using website-owned components and interactions.
The frontend should remain unaware of the external XML/SOAP representation.
Stage 4 — Establish operational readiness
Confirm:
- secrets and rotation;
- network access;
- timeouts;
- monitoring;
- support ownership;
- external failure behaviour.
Coexistence
Catalogue-backed products and live-search products do not need to share the same data-access pattern.
A useful architecture can support both:
catalogue-backed discovery ─┐
├─> customer website
live supplier search ───────┘
The integration method should follow the characteristics of the source rather than force every supplier into one pattern.