RateHawk: unified flight booking service

Emerging Travel Group (ETG) is a global travel technology company serving millions of travelers and a large network of travel agents, tour operators and corporate clients worldwide. Its B2B booking platform for travel professionals, RateHawk, is the core of a distribution business that spans B2B and B2C.

ETG grows through strategic partnerships and supplier integrations. It is expanding from its hotel base into a full travel offering, and flights are a strategic growth area.

ETG wanted to add several low-cost airline providers to RateHawk’s flight portfolio without compromising product quality, delivery efficiency or the reliability of work with external vendors. Low-cost carriers are a large and growing part of air travel, and RateHawk’s customers expect to book them alongside hotels. Without them, ETG would lose bookings to competitors and could not offer complete trip packages.

Five constraints shaped the project:

• Supplier fragmentation. Each provider used its own SOAP/XML protocol, login method and booking flow, so every new provider threatened a rebuild.
• Asynchronous confirmations. Airlines sometimes confirmed bookings hours later, leaving gaps in booking status.
• Price volatility. Low-cost fares can change between search and ticketing, risking overcharged customers.
• Many parties to coordinate. ETG’s business teams, several engineering teams and outside airline vendors each had different priorities and timelines.
• Production standards. The system had to meet financial-grade security from day one and handle high traffic.

Civitta owned delivery end to end, from product discovery and requirements through engineering, testing and production release, acting as the single link between ETG’s business side, its engineering teams and the airline vendors. Instead of building each integration separately, we designed one flight booking service between RateHawk and all airline suppliers.

• Product management. We turned business goals into a prioritized backlog with clear acceptance criteria, and planned releases around vendor availability and certification windows.
• One unified API. A single REST API (OpenAPI 3.0) hides each supplier’s protocol behind one interface for every client application. A standard connector pattern lets a new airline be added without changing core application logic.
• Automatic booking tracking. A background job queue (PostgreSQL/River) checks with the airline every 5 seconds for the first 3 minutes, then every 30 minutes for up to 72 hours.
• Price deviation guard. A booking is stopped if the airline’s price moves more than 2% from the price quoted at prebook.
• Security and observability. Stored airline login tokens are encrypted (AES-256-GCM in Redis) with automatic re-login, and events stream to downstream systems over Kafka with SASL/TLS. Prometheus metrics, structured logging with request tracing and pprof profiling support production operations.
• Vendor coordination. We held regular syncs with ETG product owners and kept direct technical channels with airline vendors for spec clarifications, test environments and certification. Risks were tracked openly so blockers surfaced early, not at release time.

The solution was built with Go (Chi router), PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Docker Compose and OpenAPI code generation.

RateHawk can now sell low-cost airline inventory through a single, secure and observable booking service.

• Low-cost airline providers integrated and live in production (insert number).
• One API contract replaced several supplier-specific integrations.
• Faster onboarding.
• Reliable tracking. Bookings are followed through supplier delays of up to 72 hours.
• Overcharging prevented by the 2% price deviation guard.
• Predictable delivery. Clear ownership gave business, engineering and vendors one point of contact, and structured vendor communication surfaced issues early.
• Faster support. Security was built in from the start, and full observability speeds up production support.

ETG now has a scalable base for flight distribution. Adding the next airline is a repeatable, low-risk process rather than a new project, and ETG’s teams can extend the framework on their own, so flight inventory can grow alongside the hotel business.

1. Build the abstraction layer first. A good unified contract pays off with every provider added after it.
2. Vendor coordination is often the critical path, not the code. Direct technical channels with vendors and early access to test environments save weeks.
3. Design for asynchrony and price change from the first release. Assume suppliers confirm late and fares move. The approach works for any platform that aggregates outside suppliers, such as hotels, car rental, rail, insurance, payments or banking APIs, and for any organization that needs one partner to own delivery across internal teams and third-party vendors.