GuestCentric, which develops e-commerce solutions for independent hotels, gave developers access to its platform through a Developers Cloud.
Filipe Machaz, GuestCentric vice president of product development, says developers will have access to GuestCentric website and API documentation through the cloud.
In a YouTube video about the Developers Cloud, Machaz says "you'll have multiple people developing small ideas on top of this infrastructure."
Here's the video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkitdSnrhcU&feature=player_embedded#!
The company says the Developers Cloud will enhance the GuestCentric platform and give Web designers and developers the ability to add e-commerce solutions to their hotel industry products.
Nuno Silva, a partner in Wiz Interactive, a digital communications agency in Lisbon, Portugal, says the company is using a GuestCentric API to integrate two clients' websites with the GuestCentric booking system and is working on a mobile app for a customer in Portugal.
"At the point when we met GuestCentric, we had a problem with travel business clients: We had to develop, sometimes from scratch, the booking and promotional framework," Silva says. "That made our proposals expensive to the client (or potential client) and very time-consuming for us."
He says the GuestCentric API enabled Wiz Interactive to offer clients more-competitive proposals "because we can get a booking system fully working in a matter of days."
GuestCentric President and CEO Pedro Colaco says the idea for the Developers Cloud emerged when boutique properties approached GuestCentric looking for sophisticated designs, but "we were a product, not a services, company."
Colaco says four or five developers are using the GuestCentric Developers Cloud, which they can access for free.
There is an approval process to integrate the development work with the GuestCentric platform and then the developers can make their work available to the community for free or on a commercial basis, Colaco says.
Colaco says when developers want to sell their work to clients then the client has to become a GuestCentric customer or the developer must become a GuestCentric agent.