Radya Labs Launches Tixify, A Hotel Reservation App for Windows Phone

At the launch of Nokia's latest Windows Phones, the Lumia 920 and 820, in Jakarta earlier this week, Radya Labs, the leading Indonesian Windows Phone development company showed off its latest app called Tixify. Tixify is a third party client for Tiket.com which allows Windows Phone users to reserve hotel rooms directly from their phones. At the moment Tixify does not accommodate for travel and concert ticket purchases.

Running on the back of Tiket.com's infrastructure and network, Tixify provides access to reserve rooms from over 1000 hotels in 60 cities in Indonesia. The app contains photo galleries for the hotels featured in the app to give travelers some idea as to what they look like.

Travelers can arrange for the period of their stay, which type of rooms and how many are required, and how many people will be staying, right from the app. Information for each hotel includes the facilities and amenities provided, and payment options are available at the end of the booking process. Currently Tixify users can only choose to pay for their accommodation via bank transfer or KlikBCA, but other options are in the process of being made available.

While the app is certainly functional and helps people find a place to stay, it strangely does not provide addresses for any of the hotels listed in the app, not does it provide a map, which could make it very difficult to find the locations. Additionally, the photo gallery also does not feature full size photos, showing only thumbnails on a grid. There may be a ton of photos for each hotel, but they're all very tiny.

According to Puja Pramoedya, co-founder and developer at Radya Labs, Tixify took about three weeks to develop from its initial design to submission to Windows Phone Store, including verification of the app to Tiket.com's infrastructure, to make sure things work smoothly. To make the app compatible with both Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8, Radya Labs used a technique called Light Up which allows a Windows Phone app to detect the environment in which it is installed and deliver the appropriate features. On Windows Phone 8, the live tile allows Tixify to show the latest promos.

If the name sounds familiar, it's because the developers of Tixify were also part of the Paris van Java team that developed Taxify, the taxi reservation app which won SparxUp Hackathon back in early October. Pramoedya said that the team built Taxify in less than 20 hours because it did not have to deal with external systems and infrastructures like it did with Tixify and no contingencies were taken to anticipate errors and failures, something that would have needed to be done if the app was going to be launched to the public.

Since the app is based on Tiket's infrastructure, unfortunately we haven't found a reason to use this app in favor of Tiket's own website, which works fine from the browser in Windows Phone. We'll let you know if we found some.

You can view shots of Tixify on our Tumblr or download it to your Windows Phone from the Windows Phone Store