Dear customers, dear partners,

even if it takes longer than hoped with the new start of the travel industry: we hold on to our optimism!

Our teams have designed and programmed – partly in close cooperation with you – a new DaVinci version 1090, the most important innovations of which we would like to give you an overview of below. We hope to support you with it in your business and your daily work as usual.

Stay confident,

Michael Becher
CEO

The „Best of“ of the actual DaVinci Release 1090
DaVinci is fit for PSD2
Digital travel documents from the new “Document Store”
Extranet for Service Provider and Hotels

More news from DaVinci and Dynamic Production
Patricio Travel relies on DaVinci for its tennis and activity tours
New Service Provider in flexFlight and flexHotel
Eventim uses BEWOTEC tools for Dynamic Production

Technical Specifications
System requirements DaVinci
Releasedata DaVinci

Just in time for the 2nd EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2) to come into force on January 1, 2021, the required interfaces have been updated in DaVinci – making the system PSD2 “fit”. The new obligation for strong customer authentication for card payments has made it necessary to update the interfaces of the payment service providers used by DaVinci users, first and foremost PMT and Papagena.

The changeover to the new version was accompanied by an information letter to our customers and went smoothly.

By the way: as a member of the DRV working group on PSD2, we are very closely involved in the further developments on this topic and contribute to the benefit of our customers.

The Corona pandemic has once again accelerated the trend towards digitization, also for travel documents: paperless and contactless is not only fast, cost-effective and secure, but also environmentally friendly.

With the cloud-based “Document Store”, BEWOTEC has now created a self-sufficient, digital filing center for tour operators, in which different document categories can be generated from various systems, filed and sent to tour operator customers via different channels.

To generate travel documents, booking data from DaVinci (or other tour operator systems) is transferred to the “Document Store” after creation or after each change, and stored securely in the cloud. From this, tickets – currently DB rail tickets, in future also online tickets, vouchers and boarding passes for flights, hotels and ships – are generated for customers. Rail & Fly tickets are automatically added to the process at a defined point in time, when required.

Other useful documents for the travel guest, such as hygiene regulations, luggage tags, general terms and conditions, or even a digital travel guide, can also be stored in the “Document Store” from any source and in any format. The guest receives an invitation to retrieve the documents independently via the tour operator’s customer portal. Alternatively, the documents can be added to an e-mail that is sent from the Document Store to the tour operator’s customer via the e-mail server at a defined time.

The “Document Store” went live for our pilot customer TUI Cruises in March. Further expansion stages envisage the generation of travel documents from different service providers, additional distribution channels such as Wallet or Passbook Apps, and optimization of the interface for configuring document dispatch.

BEWOTEC’s new backend solution for supporting extranet applications for DaVinci tour operators and their service providers is given an additional function for retrieving comprehensive booking overviews with version 1090. This allows tour operators to add additional value to their extranet for service providers (e.g. hotels).

Extranet applications facilitate contingent management between tour operators and their hotel partners in particular, as the latter can set, change and price contingents independently via secure access. This relieves the tour operator of the manual effort that used to be involved in making changes, which were often transmitted by fax, telephone or e-mail. DaVinci’s backend modules provide the necessary methods for this.

The now implemented booking overview is not only helpful for the organizer, but also for the hotel partners: Here it can be seen how many rooms have been sold, which guests are arriving and if there are any special requests.

Finally, DaVinci version 1091 will add request handling support to the extranet methods. The organizer can set the status to “Request” for a hotel that is in high demand and for which the purchased contingent has already been completely sold. The hotel is automatically notified of the request by mail when the booking is received and can respond to the request via the extranet application.

Extranet user interfaces are administered by the tour operator. A partner company of BEWOTEC has already developed an English-language frontend and put it into production for a DaVinci user.

Patricio Travel has been organizing trips for active vacationers since 1996. In the meantime, more than 500 groups use the 171 tennis courts in five top-class hotels of the Passau-based tour operator every year to play tennis or participate in international tournaments.

The fitness offer, which Patricio Travel has expanded in cooperation with the fitness service provider “Fitness First” as a further foothold, is also aimed at sporty guests:  For them, package tours with use of the fitness studios including courses and personal training are designed in three luxurious hotels on the Turkish Riviera.

DaVinci has been the technical basis for the packaging of trips for Patricio Travel’s now 295,000 guests for several months. In order to offer its customers even more flexibility and to make work processes as efficient as possible, Patricio will also use dynamic production via BEWOTEC’s flexStore.

With Jet2.com and Cretan Holiday, two established providers will soon be expanding the portfolio for dynamic production in flexStore. The British “low-fare” airline Jet2.com flies from ten British cities to numerous European vacation destinations, mainly on the Mediterranean, as well as the Canary Islands. We are currently in the final certification phase.

Cretan Holiday, one of the largest Greek incoming agencies, is already a partner of many German tour operators. In flexHotel, the extensive hotel portfolio will be ready for dynamic production in the second quarter.

The event operator “eventim-made”, a company of the ticket and entertainment provider CTS EVENTIM, has been using flexStore and flexHotel since 2020. With the option of booking an overnight stay in addition to the event ticket, the event operator is aiming to make the overall experience of its customers even more perfect.

• OS: Windows 8 / Server 2012 R2 / Windows 10 / Server 2016
• SQL: Server 2016 / Server 2017 / Server 2019 (including full-text-search)
• ODBC Treiber: SQL Server Native Client 11.0
• Microsoft Framework 3.5 SP1  / 4.8

• Microsoft XML Parser 4.0 SP2 (x86)
• Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Package (x86)  2010 / 2013 / 2015 / 2017 / 2019
• Crystal Report: Runtime 2013
• Microsoft ReportViewer  2015  Redistributables (in case of using Reporting Services Reports within DaVinci)

• Version 1088: July 21, 2020
• Version 1089: November 19, 2020
• Version 1090: March 15, 2021