NoSQL for Travel and Hospitality

Run and manage your travel & hospitality applications autonomously on Kubernetes

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.

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.
Learn more

Global hotel giant Marriott moved reservations and inventory systems off its mainframe and away from Oracle to Couchbase, achieving 4,000 transactions per second.
Learn more

From fleet tracking to crew services, Couchbase offers a single source of truth for United for 41,000 pilots, attendants, crew, and schedulers.

Learn more

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

See how much faster Ryanair’s mobile app is with Couchbase Mobile

Travel & hospitality applications with Couchbase

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

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

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, while Ryanair relies on Couchbase to provide real-time flight inventory and seat prices.

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

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.

Fleet tracking

Monitor fleet movement, track performance and usage data, and collect information about machinery and people easily and accurately, with or without a network connection. See how Coyote is creating a safer, more efficient driving experience with Couchbase.

Mobile wallet

Whether it’s checking in for a flight, displaying real-time gate or ticket information, or accessing user profile information like boarding passes, companies like United Airlines and Innovative Transit Solutions use Couchbase to power their mobile wallet.

Recommend in real-time

Capture customer engagements in real time to deliver personalized recommendations relevant to product, inventory, and your customer. With Couchbase, cruise lines like Carnival and major theme parks have added personalized services into existing applications without having to worry about the impact on customer experience.

User profile

Deliver fast and seamless login, authentication, and profile management, including user preferences and activity history. As the number of users, complexity of user profile data, and user experience expectations accelerate, Couchbase handles the workload and scales to meet those demands. Learn how Marriott uses Couchbase to store 13M documents and run 200 transactions per second.

Mainframe offload

By caching frequently used data, response times are improved and costs are substantially lowered through reduced workloads. If your app runs on a relational database like Oracle which requires costly hardware in order to scale, or a mainframe like Db2 which charges you by the MIP, a scale-out cache that runs on low-cost servers is more cost-effective.

Travel & hospitality reference architecture

Customer 360
Catalog & Inventory Management
Field Service

Travel & hospitality solutions

Customer 360

Power the user experience with flexible preferences, booking options, and recommendations, from the web to the mobile app.

Learn More

Catalog & inventory management

Power the shopping cart, inventory/price engine, recommendation engine, reservation data, and content catalog.

Learn More

Field service

Power travel and hospitality applications, including remote employee/crew services applications and asset/fleet tracking.

Learn More

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.

Learn More