How Travel & Hospitality Companies are Transforming their Customer Experience
Deliver the scale, high performance, and reliability today’s travel and hospitality applications require
The travel and hospitality industry depends on a complex network of interactions between travelers, consolidators, suppliers, maintenance providers, call centers, web services, and management services. Couple that with look-to-book ratios doubling annually to a staggering 1000:1 in the past decade, and it becomes nearly impossible to support such an ecosystem with existing transactional and analytical systems. For travel companies who are looking to keep up with this extraordinary pace, Couchbase provides the database that powers microservice-based architectures and brings the scale, high performance, flexibility, and high reliability today’s web, mobile, and IoT applications demand.
Wayne Carter, Head of Mobile at Couchbase talks about how the travel industry is using data to revolutionize the customer experience.
See the use cases and solutions powered by Couchbase
Amadeus, the world’s leading transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, depends on Couchbase to deliver 8M ops-per-second at <2.5 ms response time.
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Global hotel giant Marriott moved reservations and inventory systems off its mainframe and away from Oracle to Couchbase, achieving 4,000 transactions per second.
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From fleet tracking to crew services, Couchbase offers a single source of truth for United for 41,000 pilots, attendants, crew, and schedulers.
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Why Couchbase NoSQL for travel & hospitality
Scale: Easier, more affordable scalability
Couchbase’s network-centric architecture with a high-performance replication backbone allows the database to be easily extended while maintaining performance at scale. Unlike relational databases like Oracle and MySQL, Couchbase supports ever-increasing look-to-book ratios and highly seasonal workloads in heavy travel seasons which cause significant spikes in throughput demands. Couchbase scales (in, out, up, or down) easily and without disruption to meet these demands. Unlike MongoDB™, Couchbase won’t run out of steam when you need it most.
Blog: Scaling a Couchbase cluster for increasing and decreasing demand
Learn more about Couchbase’s Multi-Dimensional Scaling which allows you to separate, isolate, and scale individual database services
Performance: Better performance and higher availability than any other database
It’s no wonder that 95% of the world’s travel searches flow through Couchbase. Aggregation sites such as Kayak and Skyscanner present results in the order they get them – first come, first served. Customers see the flights, hotels, and rentals that are returned the fastest. At all layers of the booking experience, customers expect immediate responsiveness, regardless of geography, time, or channel (web, mobile, etc.). Through its distributed nature and fully integrated cache, Couchbase’s memory-centric architecture gives your application the sub-millisecond responsiveness it requires.
See how Amadeus delivers 8M ops/second at <2.5 ms response time
Get the competitive NoSQL performance benchmark
See how Couchbase outperforms on enterprise workloads
Availability: Built-in high availability and disaster recovery
Travel applications and services need to be available 24/7. Couchbase provides five-nines availability with built-in high availability and flexible cross datacenter replication (XDCR) that supports disaster recovery and data locality requirements. Couchbase also supports ship-to-shore topologies, allowing vehicles and machines to operate even when not connected. With Couchbase, you have full control over the topology – unidirectional, bidirectional, or any configuration you need.
Blog: Couchbase high availability and disaster recovery: Setting up XDCR step by step
Documentation: Couchbase availability
Presentation: Next Level High Availability with Couchbase Server 5.5
Flexibility: Lower costs and faster time to market
The variety of products, characteristics, and options that need to be represented is constantly changing. Integrating completely separate business systems, as the result of a merger or acquisition, is an ongoing challenge. Couchbase’s powerful query language allows developers to easily query JSON data using familiar, SQL-like expressions. Tightly integrated full-text search, real-time analytics, and powerful eventing services make it easy to add new features to your application on the fly without moving data into and managing myriad database technologies, finally putting an end to database sprawl.
Learn more about N1QL, our SQL for JSON query language
Take the N1QL tutorial
Mobile: Integrated mobile capabilities support omnichannel experiences
Couchbase is the only NoSQL database that supports experiences online, in store, or on the go. Couchbase Mobile extends Couchbase Server to the edge with an embedded NoSQL database (Couchbase Lite) and a web gateway (Sync Gateway), includes peer-to-peer replication, and enables locally connected applications like in-flight services.
Build a sample app with Couchbase Mobile
Travel & hospitality applications with Couchbase
Price/product catalog
Price/product catalog
Power your booking engine with a flexible, scalable price/product catalog. Cars.com uses Couchbase to power its ever-changing inventory of 5M vehicles and cutting-edge vehicle pricing application.
Booking engine
Booking engine
Facilitate bookings with the shopping cart service and avoid reservation abandonment. A booking engine may include components like pricing/product catalogs, an inventory/pricing engine, and more. With Couchbase’s built-in cache, get the performance at scale needed to meet shopper demand. Major travel companies like Amadeus have built their booking engine on Couchbase.
Inventory and pricing
Inventory and pricing
Give passengers the ability to search availability and compare pricing anytime, anywhere, on any device. With Couchbase, Amadeus powers 8M operations/second for its booking engine.
Reservation & PNR
Reservation & PNR
Couchbase powers real-time updates on availability, changes, promotions, reservations, and passenger name records (PNR) for companies like Amadeus, through which 800M passengers annually make their travel reservations.
Crew services
Crew services
Improve employee experience and increase efficiency for crew operations. With Couchbase, United Airlines is able to maintain accurate and up-to-date information from multiple mainframe application data silos, service all information channels, and quickly build and deploy FAA-approved mobile applications.
Travel & hospitality reference architecture
Travel & hospitality solutions
Customer 360
Customer 360
Power the user experience with flexible preferences, booking options, and recommendations, from the web to the mobile app.
Catalog & inventory management
Catalog & inventory management
Power the shopping cart, inventory/price engine, recommendation engine, reservation data, and content catalog.
Field service
Field service
Power travel and hospitality applications, including remote employee/crew services applications and asset/fleet tracking.
IoT data management
IoT data management
Leverage IoT devices like sensors, keycards, mobile devices, and more to deliver personalized offers to travelers in real time, collect customer data, and more.
