Berge & Meer was founded in 1978 in Rengsdorf in the Westerwald. Many millions of customers have since spent their vacations with Germany's leading direct travel provider. Today, the expert for round trips, adventure tours and cruises offers more than 1,500 trips to over 140 countries. Catalogs and website inform about the offer, which is bookable on-line and by telephone over the internal call center, in addition, in the travel agency.
In addition to the berge-meer.de website, the aldi-reisen.de portal has also been operated and managed by the customer since 2020.
The objective of the new web platform is to provide a user-friendly interface for searching and booking the customer's wide range of tourism offers. The products offered range from package tours to flights, rental cars, round trips and special topics such as bike tours. The existing PHP-based solution was to be successively replaced by a modern software architecture using new technologies (Rails, Angular). The websites should be easy and comfortable to use on all common browsers and also on mobile devices - for new websites like aldi-reisen.de the strategic goal is: mobile first.
Since the start of the project in 2016, the neusta developers have been working closely with the web team of the customer Berge & Meer Touristik GmbH. The long-standing collaboration with a neusta core team enables competent consulting and collaboration in the design of the web platform's architecture.
The teams use agile approaches and methods such as Scrum and Kanban to ensure a lively exchange even within distributed teams and to be able to implement new features quickly. Jira from Atlassian is used for project management and as a workflow tool.
The team is dynamically scaled depending on upcoming projects and features; additionally required developers can be quickly trained as needed.
The architecture of the web platform is based on an app-based approach. The web front ends use a common back end that provides a high-performance search as well as interfaces to CMS, product databases and booking systems.
The use of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform ensures high availability and enables the customer to react cost-effectively to seasonal or action-related load fluctuations by scaling at short notice.
Development takes place on GitHub. The quality of the software is ensured by a six-eyes principle, in which several developers check each other's code.
An important aspect - especially for the aldi-reisen.de site - was to provide the customer with a fast-responding interface. To this end, server-side rendering was used to optimize the page.
The websites offer the user comprehensive information on the product variety of the Berge & Meer Touristik travel world. The operation is intuitive and in particular the newer Aldi-Reisen page is also comfortable to use for smartphone and tablet users thanks to responsive design.
Thanks to consistent performance optimization, as of July 2021 the Aldi Travel site is the fastest tourism site of a discounter in the Google ranking, ahead of the sites of Lidl and Rewe.
