Lycan is a multi-tenanted platform as a service (PaaS) which solves the technical challenges faced with vacation rental distribution. Using Lycan you extract, transform, load and validate vacation rental property data from various integration partners. The purpose of Lycan is to allow brands to curate properties under a common business purpose, set up commercials for distribution of the properties and use Lycan to manage your business requirements and rules.
Lycan allows for your technical team to supply reference data (ie from your own property management system), extract the data based on importing rules, validate the source data, transform it by cleaning it, applying business rules, and checking general data integrity, property data can then be staged in collections which allow you to curate rentals based on validation rules and finally publish properties to our integration partners.
Who is Lycan built for?
Lycan is primarily built for software businesses who want to focus on their core operations without stressing over the complexities of data integrations with various supplies and vendors.
- Marketplaces who want to increase their inventory from various property management systems and do not have the capacity to handle their own data integrations.
- Property management software suppliers who want to connect their inventory to various third party marketplaces/channels for distribution.
- Payment platforms who might need access to enquiry/booking data to automatically connect booking data to an external guest relationship enquiry platform
- Meta-marketplaces who might want inventory from various partners and who can supply reservations/enquiries back to managers
- Channel Managers who want to complement Lycan with additional reach to more channels and marketplaces
Lycan is not built for managers or owners. If you want distribution/channel management you can reach out to one of our PMS partners who use Lycan and engage with their PMS directly.
Overview of Components
Multi-tenanted Application
Lycan structures all data around the concept of an application. Each application is isolated from other applications, meaning that as a software provider, if you use a hosted version of Lycan you can keep your own data secure and publish/manage your own users from within Lycan
Restful API
Lycan has a feature rich JSON based Restful API with HATEOAS support (self describing API). We publish Postman collections for our API and can easily set up Sandboxes to isolate development from your production environment.
Integration Partners
Integrations on Lycan can be inbound or outbound. The ETL ("extract, transform, load") lifecycle means that Lycan needs to be able to extract data from a remote system (inbound connections) and then also load the data to a third party system (outbound connections). The outbound connections are typically referred to as channel management.
Advanced Logging
Lycan has a standard seven day data retention policy, allowing you to inspect all internal API requests, view outgoing HTTP requests and audit all batch execution jobs which are processing scheduled tasks for each integration. This allows you to always have a birds eye view of all data processing on Lycan
Reporting and Exporting
You can create custom reports from advanced filtering options on Lycan and export to CSV for your own data analysis or import directly to your own business intelligence tools.
Property Collections
Property Collections are containers which share property data between any number of users, internally referred to as members. As the owner of a property collection, you can control access rules to your collection, control your commercial agreements around billing (ie how reservations are handled for commission) and set strict automated moderation rules to help handle curation for tens of thousands of properties.
Elastic Search Module
Lycan can publish all listing data from a property collection directly to a hosted or external Elastic Search cluster. This allows you to create your own marketing frontend, and use Lycan as the backend datasource powering your business.
Observable Notifications
You can create "observers" to watch for any changes to things such as reservations, property changes, member changes and then create notifications which receive the output from those changes. For instance, you might want to receive a Slack notification any time a new reservation is received, or receive an email any time a new member joins a property collection.
Gateway Integration
Lycan can connect to over 100 different payment gateways from around the globe, and supports pre-authorization(deferred payments), instand capturing, and card tokenization to your external credit card vaults for reduced PCI compliance obligations.