Still parsing travel emails

This is a follow-up post to "Parsing travel e-mails", written back in early 2019. Five years later, AI has entered the scene and one would expect there to be new and fancy parsing solutions out there. And maybe the existing ones have changed, hopefully for the better. Let's have a look. LMGTFY A simple search …

So, what is funnel.travel for, really?

Platform applications There's an inherent difficulty describing use cases for platform-type applications. If an application can be extended and configured using a plugin ecosystem, it can do whatever those plugins allow it to do. I personally like the example of WordPress, which can be so many things. funnel.travel doesn't have the same pull as WordPress, …

New features big and small

It's been a while since the last post, but not for lack of work going into funnel.travel. So here's a round-up post highlighting some recent changes. Configuration: Process bookings from It might seem like just a small, additional setting on the modifier and consumer extensions, but this one is a game-changer. Limit the processing of …

Keeping an eye on booking data quality

funnel.travel has always had a mechanism to check that fundamental data fields are properly populated. These are: ParticipantsProviders (aka vendors)Destinations The participant check is redundant if the account is set up to use an external profile system (see e.g. Integrating Umbrella Faces), and is automatically disabled with such a configuration. False positives Recently, a funnel.travel …

How want gmbh does business

I have a one-person company, want gmbh. It has one employee. Me. Which is fine, of course, if working as a freelancer, but how can want gmbh offer a product like funnel.travel with just one employee? First and foremost, funnel.travel is a product where a large effort goes into brokering deals to gain API access. …

funnel.travel: a game-changing middleware for booking data

Interview with Simon Niederberger Simon Niederberger is an outstanding software engineer. After all, he designed both Umbrella.net and Umbrella Faces. His new project funnel.travel, a state-of-the art middleware for booking data, is designed to revolutionize the management of travel information. Each booking platform tends to have its own, proprietary data format. Unifying data from several …

Using cytric

cytric Travel & Expense is the newest addition to funnel.travel. In this blog I'll outline the setup and some configuration options. We don't need traveler profiles in our data streams If your data streams don't require traveler profiles, the setup is done within seconds. Just configure a "cytric cCBD" producer extension: As usual, funnel.travel will …

How to write terrible unit tests

It's popular nowadays to strongly advocate writing unit tests, followed by awesome examples of how Mockito can help you isolate your test. This is an opinionated post about cargo cult testing. Why do we I write tests? Been there, done that. We all know why tests are important. And yet, let me point out why …

Have your people call my people

If a service provider can react to a customer's complaint about something not working, that's good. If the service provider can pro-actively contact the customer and inform them about the issue, that's better. If the service provider can detect the issue and resolve it before the customer even notices, now that's great service. Since today, …

Applying GDPR to middleware SaaS

funnel.travel has been reviewed for GDPR compliance. This weekend, the last follow-ups from that review are being pushed to production. In this blog post, I'll share some insights and feature changes resulting from the review. A quick note on the fundamentals (If you're familiar with the basics of GDPR, skip this section) GDPR applies to …