Travel Software Development Company for Search and Booking Platforms
We build metasearch, booking and inventory systems for online travel agencies, tour operators and hotel platforms. Our engineers redesigned a UK hotel metasearch engine that now answers 300 million queries a day, at 80% lower infrastructure cost.
Travel systems we built, measured in production
- 300,000,000
- queries a day on a UK hotel metasearch engine50% more traffic than the engine it replaced
- -80%
- infrastructure cost on the same system after re-architectureAnd 60% lower response time
- -65%
- flight schedule calculation time for a travel data providerPerformance engagement
Travel clients
What travel businesses need from their software
Online travel agencies, tour operators and hotel platforms come to us with the same four needs: fast search at peak, a lower cost per query, more suppliers and APIs ready for AI agents.
Fast search at Monday-morning peak
Price and availability answers that stay quick when traffic is highest.
A lower cost per query
Infrastructure that does not grow in step with traffic.
More suppliers without slower search
New suppliers, NDC content and GDS sources added without the search slowing down.
Ready for AI agents
Search and booking APIs that AI agents can call as safely as your own screens do.
Travel software development services
Travel search and metasearch
Real-time price and availability across many suppliers, the performance problem we have worked on longest, now at 300 million queries a day.
Booking and amendment flows
Booking, amendment and cancellation flows that stay consistent when a supplier fails mid-transaction, with every change recorded against the booking.
Supplier, NDC and GDS integration
Airline NDC, GDS and hotel supplier APIs, including rate limits, inconsistent responses and what a customer sees when a supplier does not answer in time.
Agent-ready search and booking APIs
APIs that AI agents can call as safely as your own screens do: idempotent, explainable and rate-limited by design, with every action logged.
Travel systems we built
- Flagship · Travel · 2019
UK hotel metasearch: 300 million queries a day at 80 percent lower cost
A SQL Server cluster that stopped scaling replaced by an in-memory data grid: 50 percent more traffic, 60 percent lower response time, 80 percent lower infrastructure cost.
300,000,000 queries / day
- Travel · Performance
Flight schedule calculation 65 percent faster on open-source Java
A DB2 and proprietary Java calculation engine at its scaling limit replaced in a proof of concept, tested against the same production input.
-65% calculation time
- Flagship · Insurance · 2026
Openkoda: Core Travel Insurance live in eight weeks, SkyGuard on the same platform
Stratoflow as implementation partner for the Openkoda insurance platform: a travel insurer from contract to production in eight weeks, and a life and aviation specialty insurer.
8 weeks to production
Why travel software is hard to build
Travel platforms depend on suppliers they do not control and traffic they cannot predict, and that is where most designs break.
Suppliers you do not control
Prices and availability are held in systems that answer slowly, inconsistently or not at all. Timeouts and fallbacks in the design decide what a traveler sees when they do not answer.
Caching without stale prices
Asking every supplier on every search is too slow and too costly, so results come from caches. Each kind of data needs its own staleness rule, or travelers see prices that no longer exist.
Traffic that spikes
A design that works in testing can fall over on a Monday morning or during a sale, so capacity, load shedding and backpressure are planned and load-tested from the start.
Cost that tracks traffic
When infrastructure cost grows in step with traffic, the usual cause is repeated work: the same supplier calls and calculations made for every search. One redesign cut that cost by 80 percent.
Stratoflow was a great partner, challenging as well as supporting our customer projects for the best outcome. They have a great pool of talent within the business - all very capable technologists, as well as being business-savvy and suitable for consultancy engagements.
Services for travel platforms
When you do not need custom travel software
If your traffic is modest and you work with a few suppliers, travel search is not a hard problem, and a standard booking platform will do the job for less.
Talk to us when the numbers have grown large enough that the architecture decides your costs and your search speed.
Questions about travel software development
How do you make travel search fast when the data is not yours?
By deciding, for each kind of data, how stale an answer may be, and designing around that. Some prices can be cached for minutes, some for seconds, some not at all. Setting those limits is the first conversation we have, because it shapes the whole design.
Can you integrate with our existing suppliers, GDS and NDC?
Usually yes. The hard part is rarely the protocol; it is the behavior: rate limits, inconsistent responses, and what to do when a supplier times out. We work that out early, because it shapes the architecture.
Can you reduce our infrastructure costs?
On one travel system a redesign cut infrastructure cost by 80 percent, mostly by removing repeated work. Whether savings like that are available to you shows up in the measurement phase of a Performance Rescue.
Do you build mobile apps?
No. We build the systems behind them: APIs, search, booking and inventory. If you need the app itself as well, we will say so early instead of taking the whole project and subcontracting the part we do not do.
Do you have travel-specific experience?
Yes. We redesigned a UK hotel aggregator’s metasearch engine to serve 300 million queries a day, cut flight schedule calculation time by 65 percent for a global flight information company, and work with airline NDC, GDS and hotel supplier APIs. TUI, WebBeds, OAG and JacTravel are among our travel clients and partners.
Are you big enough for a travel platform?
For the hard parts, search, booking and supplier integration, yes: a boutique team of senior engineers, all direct employees, with the 300-million-query engine as the reference.
What technology do you use for travel search?
Java, with Kafka for event streams and in-memory caching in front of supplier data, deployed in containers: the stack behind the 300-million-query metasearch engine. Supplier work covers airline NDC, GDS and hotel APIs.
What does travel software development cost?
A new search or booking engine is built time and materials against a written ballpark you receive after the scoping call. Performance work on an existing system starts with a measurement iteration. The main cost drivers are the number of suppliers, the traffic you expect and how fresh prices have to be.
Travel software guides from our engineers
- Travel
How to Build a Travel Search Engine: Architecture, Caching and Steps
How travel search engines work, why travel search is harder than web search, and how to build one in eight steps.
- Travel
Travel Metasearch Engines: What They Are, How They Work, Top Sites in 2026
What travel metasearch engines are, how they differ from hotel sites and OTAs, and the top sites in 2026.
- Travel
8 Travel Technology Trends for 2026: How AI Is Changing Travel
Eight travel technology trends for 2026, led by AI planning and booking, with fresh data and charts.
Book a scoping call
Thirty minutes with an architect, not a salesperson. You leave with a written view of scope, price model and whether we are the right team for it.