Travel software development company: booking engines that stay fast
Metasearch, booking and inventory systems for OTAs, tour operators and hospitality platforms. We have run a hotel metasearch engine at 300 million queries a day and cut a travel system's infrastructure cost by 80 percent.
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 platforms want from their technology
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 agents can call as safely as screens do.
What makes travel systems hard
Suppliers you do not control
Prices and availability sit in systems that answer slowly, inconsistently or not at all; the design decides what a customer sees when they do not.
Caching without stale prices
Each kind of data needs its own staleness rule, or customers see prices that no longer exist.
Traffic that spikes
A design that works in testing can fall over on a Monday morning, so capacity and back-pressure are designed in.
Cost that tracks traffic
Repeated work, rather than the cloud bill itself, is usually the cause. One redesign cut infrastructure cost by 80 percent.
Travel software we deliver
Travel search and metasearch
Real-time price and availability across many suppliers, which is the hardest performance problem in travel and the one we know best.
Booking management
Booking, amendment and cancellation flows that stay consistent when a supplier goes down mid-transaction.
Inventory and channel management
Keeping rates and availability in agreement across channels that all update at different speeds.
Supplier and NDC integration
Airline NDC, GDS and hotel supplier APIs, including rate limits, inconsistent responses and what to show a customer when a supplier does not answer in time.
Aviation and schedule processing
Flight schedule and fare calculation, where we cut processing time by 65 percent on an existing system.
Agent-ready travel APIs
Search and booking APIs designed to be called by AI agents as well as screens: idempotent, explainable, rate-limited by design.
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
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
A small search problem does not need us
If your traffic is modest and your supplier count is small, travel search is not a hard problem and a standard platform will do. Talk to us when the numbers are large enough that the architecture has started to matter.
Travel software questions
How do you make travel search fast when the data is not yours?
By deciding, per data type, how stale an answer may be and designing around that. Some prices tolerate caching for minutes, some for seconds, some not at all. Getting those boundaries right does more for perceived speed than any amount of hardware, and it is the first conversation we have.
Can you integrate with our existing suppliers, GDS and NDC?
Usually yes. The work is rarely the protocol and usually the behaviour: rate limits, inconsistent responses, and what to do when a supplier times out. We establish that early because it shapes the architecture rather than being a detail at the end.
Can you reduce our infrastructure costs?
Sometimes substantially. On one travel system a redesign cut infrastructure cost by 80 percent, mostly by removing repeated work rather than by moving provider. Whether that is available to you is answerable 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 rather than take the whole project and subcontract 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. The travel companies in the logos below are 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.
Travel engineering notes
- Guide
How to build a travel search engine
The architecture behind 300 million queries a day.
- Guide
Travel meta search engines
How metasearch works and where it breaks.
- Guide
Travel technology trends
NDC, agents and what they do to travel platforms.
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.