Dear customers, dear partners,

the touristic business year 2020/21 came to an end on October 31. Once again the Corona pandemic has left its mark on it and, in view of the 4th wave, the upcoming year will probably not bring a return to normal times either. We have all come to terms with the often unpredictable conditions and are striving to deliver our best performance as usual.

At BEWOTEC, we are focusing on continuous optimization in DaVinci, while in parallel “DaVinci NT” is taking on more and more concrete contours – our “new technology”, cloud-based SaaS solution for tour operators.

Together with our customer Sunweb Group, we have also realized their switch to dynamic production in recent months. Soon, in addition to “Sunweb Sun”, other brands of this international tour operator will also be able to produce dynamically and thus provide customers with a multiple of the previous offer volume.

Please find more details on these and other topics from the DaVinci world below. Enjoy reading.

Michael Becher
CEO

The „Best of“ of DaVinci Release 1093
App for monitoring DaVinci operations successfully completes pilot phase
Expansion of release notes: now also covering DaVinci NT and flex products

From Vision to Start-Up Application – Sneak Preview DaVinci New Technology
User Management
Flights
Tasks

More news from DaVinci and Dynamic Production
Sunweb in Benelux dynamically sells trips via OTDS player
Universal brings reservation of preferred rooms to its website

Technical Data
System Requirements DaVinci
Release Dates DaVinci

Is everything running smoothly in the system? A look at the DaVinci Info Center (DIC) provides an overview, any time and even on the go: in an user-friendly app. The pilot phase of the DIC app, which is available for Android and IOS, has now been successfully completed; the tool is already providing the first customers, in particular their administrators and application experts, with meaningful on-demand key data on the ongoing operation of the DaVinci application:

• Overview of executed jobs (scheduled tasks) with direct notification when errors have occurred.
• Overview of the errors registered during operation with detailed information, which usually allows a quick containment for correction
• Overview of registered requests on the web services
  • GenVAS web service – booking requests (number, processing time, graph showing distribution over the period under consideration)
  • API web services such as PPS, SSC BDS (number, processing time, graph showing distribution over the period under consideration)
  • Outgoing service calls to flexFlight, flexHotel etc.

The next steps for expanding the DaVinci Info Center have already been defined: First, the queuing system will be optimized, with which the log information is transmitted to the central data pool on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Also on the roadmap is a notification function by means of which a push email is initiated to a defined group of users in the event of an error registration.

The Info Center app is primarily aimed at administrators and application experts on the DaVinci user side. The Android version can be downloaded easily from the Google Playstore. The IOS version for iPhone or iPad users can be downloaded from BEWOTEC’s technical documentation portal. In both cases, please let us know in advance that you want to use the app – so we can activate you as a user for the download and prepare the installation for you.

You are always up to date with the respective version in our Zendesk tool now also for DaVinci NT and the flex products (flexFlight, flexHotel and flexStore). On the start page DaVinci Support@BEWOTEC GmbH you will now also find release notes for these software solutions, which – as already known from the DaVinci area – contain links to the respective tickets for more details. With each release of a new version the release notes are updated.

In spring 2021, we took the disruption caused by the Corona pandemic as an opportunity to turn our vision of a new tour operator software into reality. Our in-house start-up to create “DaVinci New Technology” was founded. With DaVinci NT, a cloud-based “Software as a Service” solution, we want to remove the boundaries between classic and dynamic production and redesign the relevant processes in travel production in a new and stringent way.

Our philosophy: We place all new developments (as far as it makes sense) in DaVinci NT; the functionalities from conventional DaVinci are transferred successively and optimized. Initially, only pilot customers will work with the new platform, but in the foreseeable future DaVinci NT will also be available to all other interested DaVinci customers as part of a transparent and orderly migration process. A shutdown of the previous DaVinci software is not planned so far.

At irregular intervals, we’d like to share with you here what is happening in our start-up and around DaVinci NT.

DaVinci NT: our start-up presents the first modules

After an intensive phase of basic research and the design of a modern system landscape, several applications have taken shape in the meantime. A first tool for document dispatch is even already in use at one of our customers. So it’s time for an interim progress report at DaVinci NT, where the following modules have already been implemented in the new, intuitive and refreshingly tidy user interface:

User Management

DaVinci NT offers a well-structured creation and management of users, organized as individual employees or in groups. An overview of the modularly structured access rights is quickly gained and editing is made easy.

Tasks

Minor issues often block the completion of a process, but unfortunately their resolution can quickly fall out of focus. If, for example, a customer email address is missing or travel documents could not find their way to the customer digitally, the process remains at a standstill – in the worst case, for too long. The task function integrated in DaVinci NT offers a remedy here, because a small entry in the task list shows what is missing and makes it easier to work through. As soon as the e-mail address has been found out and stored, the dispatch can be triggered by a button via “Tasks”, for example.

Flights

Keeping an overview in the flight jungle is certainly a challenge. We have used all our know-how and creativity to open up all options for the creation, calculation and management of your purchased charter flights and to still make it as easy as possible for you to handle.

DaVinci NT combines all flights – whether dynamically or classically purchased – with route, provider and contract in one view. Availability and load factor for all classes can always be monitored quickly in the detail view. The Flights module of DaVinci NT thus maps all processes from purchasing to sales in a logically structured, easy-to-use and clearly designed application.

Last but not least: the “info-i”

Cumbersome searches in the documentation are a matter of the past with DaVinci NT. The “Info-i” in the top navigation bar opens the always up-to-date and context-sensitive software documentation and quickly answers your questions.

Next, we plan to merge flexFlight into DaVinci NT.

Contracts with over 6,000 accommodations, 400 employees, more than one million customers per year: the Sunweb Group, the largest direct tour operator in the Benelux, now serves customers in its home market with dynamically packaged tours from the OTDS player.

The strategic project to convert Sunweb’s distribution technology from pre-packaging to dynamic packaging, with which Sunweb aims to become the leading IT tourism company in Europe, reached its preliminary climax with the conversion of the “Sunweb Sun” brand at the end of September 2021. The other brands “Eliza was here”, “Primavera” and “Gogo” will now also be successively converted. There are also plans to lift the “Sunweb Ski” brand, with a focus on bus travel, onto the new infrastructure from mid-2022.

With the departure from pre-packaged travel products, Sunweb reaches a milestone: The flight content can now be fed flexibly, because dynamically, from the BEWOTEC flexStore.

The high demand load from the travel-intensive Benelux market requires a sophisticated, state-of-the-art technology concept with the operation of the OTDS player instances in the Azure Cloud in docking containers under Kubernetes. The scaled-out player instances are continuously loaded with updated data – giving Sunweb a multiple of additional offerings in sales in its core market.

Sunweb has been working with DaVinci from BEWOTEC since 2001 and grew on this platform from a provider of youth travel (“Gogo”) to the leading direct tour operator in Benelux. Starting from the core markets in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, the Sunweb Group has expanded to Denmark, Germany and the UK.

The Swiss tour operator Universal Flugreisen offers its internet customers a very special service in its newly designed website: customers can find hotel room plans for the Universal Classic portfolio and reserve their desired room online. This is made possible by the OTDS player and BEWOTEC’s web services in the background.

Another new and customer-friendly feature is the option to choose a flexible travel period. Behind this solution stand the dynamically packable flights from flexFlight, which allow a flexible length of stay according to customers’ individual wishes.

• OS: Windows 8 / Server 2012 R2 / Windows 10 / Server 2016
• SQL: Server 2016 / Server 2017 / Server 2019 (including full-text-search)
• ODBC Driver: 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 1091: May 31, 2021
• Version 1092: June 15, 2021
• Version 1093: September 30, 2021
• Version 1094: planned for February 2022