Operational Booking Systems

High-Scale Travel Booking Platform

Enterprise integration engineering inside Emirates Skywards' travel platform — identity, third-party rail APIs, distributed booking orchestration, and hybrid payments

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Okta SSO

multi-provider rail APIs

hybrid payments

Context

Worked as a Senior Full-Stack Developer at Snowfall Travel, contracted by Emirates Skywards — the loyalty program of one of the world's largest airlines. The project integrated multimodal European rail booking into the existing travel platform of one of the world's largest airline loyalty programs.

Next.js frontend with Python microservices backend
Okta SSO integration with OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect
gRPC and REST APIs connecting multiple third-party rail providers
Hybrid payment processing — credit cards + loyalty miles redemption

Problem

Emirates Skywards needed to expand their travel ecosystem beyond flights — integrating European rail booking with SSO, real-time availability, and hybrid payments, all under an aggressive timeline.

API Integration

Multiple third-party rail APIs with inconsistent schemas and protocols
Data transformation required between gRPC and REST interfaces

Data Consistency

Distributed microservices required transactional guarantees across booking lifecycle
Session state, user profiles, and loyalty balances must stay synchronized

Hybrid Payments

Support credit cards + loyalty miles in a single transaction
Partial redemption calculations across Visa, Mastercard, and Amex

Solution

Auth & Identity

Implemented secure Single Sign-On with Okta (OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect), retrieving user profiles, loyalty balances, and managing session persistence with graceful token expiration handling.

Railway Search

Built real-time station search and train offer discovery across multiple European rail providers, with gRPC-to-REST data transformation, geographic filtering, and dynamic schedule synchronization.

Booking & Offers

Orchestrated the end-to-end booking lifecycle — from streaming train offers with fare details and seat availability, through trip selection, to distributed transaction management ensuring data consistency across services.

Payment Processing

Implemented hybrid payment processing supporting credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Amex), loyalty miles redemption, or partial combinations — engineered for low latency in the payment path with comprehensive error handling.

Product demo

Impact

Services Shipped

Payment Types

API Protocols Bridged

Outcome

Shipped 4 core services into Emirates Skywards' production platform — authentication, rail search, booking orchestration, and hybrid payment processing — supporting 3 payment types (credit card, loyalty miles, and combined), with search infrastructure supporting millions of monthly searches. The harder deliverable was invisible: consistent booking state across distributed services when any third-party rail provider could fail mid-transaction.

Lessons

Enterprise integration is a negotiation with reality: third-party APIs disagree with their own documentation, distributed state fails in the seams between services, and the deadline doesn't move. This shipped on time because the riskiest integrations were prototyped first and the booking lifecycle was designed around failure states rather than happy paths — the same discipline I now apply to AI systems that write into other people's platforms.