Reservation and Contracting with AI

Inspiration

Travel Connection Maldives works with more than 250 contracted resorts. Whenever we receive a new supplier contract, our team must manually review it, perform the necessary calculations, and create a sales contract. Because every resort uses different formats, rate structures, offers, and conditions, preparing each contract requires considerable time and effort.

We also receive more than 100 quotation enquiries every day. Our team currently calculates these quotations manually, which can delay our responses. In the highly competitive travel industry, even a short delay can result in losing agents and potential bookings. Many of our agents have therefore requested an online system that can provide prices and quotations instantly.

This inspired us to create AIRA — AI Reservation Agent: an intelligent platform that can understand resort contracts, calculate holiday packages, prepare quotations, and convert accepted quotations into confirmed bookings.

What it does

The platform uses AI to read supplier contracts in PDF and Word formats and transform their contents into structured information within our system.

It is designed to extract and manage:

• Accommodation rates and room types
• Special offers and discounts
• Taxes and service charges
• Meal supplements
• Transfer rates
• Stop-sale periods
• Room availability
• Contract conditions and complicated pricing rules

Our employees can communicate with AIRA through a conversational interface and describe a traveller’s requirements in natural language. AIRA will identify suitable resorts, apply the relevant contract rules, calculate the complete package price, and prepare a professional quotation instantly.

Travel agents will also be able to log in to the platform, communicate directly with AIRA, receive live quotations, and convert accepted quotations into bookings. The system can additionally answer questions from staff and agents about Maldives resorts, holiday packages, and contract conditions.

How we built it

We are developing the platform using:

• CodeIgniter and PHP for the backend
• Vue.js and Tailwind CSS for the user interface
• MySQL for storing structured contract, rate, and reservation data
• SharePoint for accessing existing supplier contract documents
• OpenAI API for contract interpretation, information extraction, conversational assistance, and quotation generation

The system combines our existing reservation data with AI-powered contract processing. When a supplier contract is uploaded or retrieved from SharePoint, AI analyses the document and extracts its commercial terms into a structured database. This information will then be used by AIRA to answer enquiries and calculate quotations.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges is that resort contracts do not follow a standard format. Rates, special offers, supplements, transfer charges, taxes, and conditions can be presented differently by every supplier.

Some contracts also contain complicated rules, overlapping offers, unclear wording, exceptions, and date-dependent conditions. The system must understand these variations while producing accurate calculations.

AI accuracy is especially important because even a small misunderstanding could produce an incorrect quotation. We therefore need validation processes that allow our team to review extracted information and confirm critical contract details.

Another major challenge is integrating the new AI-powered module with our existing reservation system while continuing to reuse existing resort, room, and operational data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have successfully developed the initial contract-processing capability and can already extract content from supplier contracts and save the structured information in our database.

This is an important milestone because it transforms complex, unstructured documents into data that can eventually be searched, calculated, and used by AIRA.

The project is still under active development, and our next immediate milestone is to complete the first working version of the AI quotation assistant. We aim to have this feature ready by the end of the week.

What we learned

We learned that AI can do much more than simply read a document. When combined with a well-designed database and clear business rules, it can transform complicated supplier contracts into useful operational information.

We also learned that reliable automation requires both AI and human validation. Contract information must be structured carefully, calculation rules must be traceable, and important results must be verified before they are shared with agents or customers.

Most importantly, we learned that AI can help our team respond faster without losing the valuable knowledge and experience of our reservation professionals.

What's next for Reservation and Contracting with AI

Our goal is to automate the repetitive parts of our contracting, quotation, and reservation workflow through AI.

The next stages include:

• Completing the AIRA quotation and package-calculation engine
• Improving the accuracy of contract extraction
• Adding staff approval and validation workflows
• Generating professional, shareable quotations
• Converting accepted quotations into bookings
• Giving travel agents secure access to AIRA
• Providing live availability and stop-sale information
• Integrating more deeply with our existing reservation system
• Automating contract updates and detecting changes in supplier terms
• Continuously improving AIRA using verified business rules and team feedback

Our vision is for AIRA to become an intelligent digital member of the Travel Connection Maldives team—available around the clock to help employees and travel agents find the right Maldives holiday, receive an accurate quotation, and complete a booking within minutes.

Built With

• api
• codeigniter
• mysql
• openai
• php
• sharepoint
• tailwind
• vue