How to Make a Travel Website? How an Online Travel Based Search Engine Works?

There are many times we see online travel websites like www.Expedia.co.uk, and ask ourselves how these travel based company making money? How to make an online travel website? How do an online travel search engine works? The reason why we want to know the answer to this question is to know whether or not we can make a travel based portal and start making money like other online travel companies. There are many online portals offering Flights, Hotels, Holidays, etc. and making huge amount of money. Can we become a travel agent and make huge money? How these travel agents are making money?

In 2009 Expedia’s first quarter profit was $635.7 Million. How these portals making money with just an online travel search engine? Is it easy to make a travel based website?

You can too have a travel based website by becoming an affiliate of any travel portal. There are two ways of making a travel based website.

First: By becoming an affiliate of a travel website.

Second: Making your own travel website and get keep the whole profit with you. That means you don’t have to share the profit with anyone.

Many travel websites provide an online travel engine for free. You can use it as your own and get commission up to 10%. This is the first method.

Second method is little difficult. You have to invest lot of money for making huge amount of money. If you have money or you are an existing travel agent and want to make your own travel based website, then second option is better for you.

The first thing you have to do is to buy the domain and the hosting. This is the initial step and you have to do that in either you want to become an affiliate or you want to have your own website. After that design your website and make it live. I know the website would be without search engine and you can’t make online searches for flights, hotels or holidays.

To make a website you need one Global Distribution System (GDS) from where you can get the latest fares. There are many GDS available in the market, like Amadeus (www.amadeus.com), Worldspan (www.worldspan.com), Sabre (www.sabre.com), Galileo (www.travelport.com/lob/gds/galileo.aspx), etc. Once you have an agreement to use any of the GDS, then you can start making your travel based search engine. After this you have to decide the technology on which you would like to make your travel based search engine. It could be PHP, JAVA, .Net or any other technology you would like to prefer. You can use open source languages like PHP or Java, if your budget is low. Now with the help of a good programmer you can tart making travel based search engine as per your needs.

The GDS takes requests and sends the response in XML format, as it’s relatively fast and easy to use. All the request/response you send/receive from GDS is in XML format. The response we get from the GDS is shown on the website by cutting the tags from the XML. Yes, to make your own search engine you need one good programmer and one web designer. There are few companies who build travel based search engines, you can take their help as well. They can provide you travel based search engine as per your requirement at affordable prices.