Travel Brand Platform
Rebuilt a global travel brand’s CMS, search, and booking platform — unifying the customer experience, reducing annual infrastructure costs by nearly £2M, and enabling faster delivery.
#Serverless#Microservices#NextJS#Storyblok#Elasticsearch
- Annual Infrastructure Savings
- £2M+
- Search Index Size
- 1.5M+ Records
- Monthly Page Views
- 50M+
- Average Page Load Time
- 500ms
Challenges
- Replacing unsupported, costly legacy booking system and Tridion CMS
- Recovering from complete loss of internal systems knowledge after team departure
- Reducing high physical hosting and Microsoft licensing costs
- Integrating multiple business units and inventory systems post-merger
- Migrating from SQL Server inventory to scalable, search-driven architecture
What I Delivered
- Recruited and structured a multi-disciplinary delivery team (architect, FE/BE leads, search engineers, QA, PM)
- Replaced Tridion CMS with Storyblok, including modular content templates for fully bespoke site layouts
- Implemented PIM-based integration between Storyblok and inventory systems feeding a new Elasticsearch-backed search API
- Trialled and ruled out in-memory graph databases due to clustering and cost constraints
- Designed modular booking/search layer enabling multiple brand integrations post-merger
- Transitioned UI deployment to OpenNext with Lambda-driven regeneration and S3 hosting
- Established CI/CD pipelines and production-ready DevOps processes
Outcomes
- Reduced annual infrastructure costs by nearly £2 million
- Merged multiple business units’ inventory systems, reducing empty units and standardising billing
- Enabled call centre team mergers for extended support hours without developer changes
- Delivered a modern, adaptable platform with full editorial control for content teams
- Left a permanent in-house engineering team in place with documented, maintainable systems