Expedia trims backend code to fly higher

Its flight-booking application is much more flexible today than it was 3 years ago[SINGAPORE] Flight booking giant Expedia is one of the older travel websites, and over the past three years, it has gone through an extensive diet on its backend code so that it can fight with leaner start-ups that have come on the scene.儲存The Nasdaq-listed firm brought in revenues of US$4 billion in 2012, and employs over 12,000 globally across its various Web properties like Hotels.com and Hotwire.com.The Expedia property itself specialises in providing a meta-search across airline carriers and aggregates flights so that users can easily compare prices.In recent years, however, the travel space has seen the entrance of players like Wego, Webjet, Skyscanner and Farecompare, which provide similar meta-search services. Many of these sites make money by charging a referral fee for bookings directed from their sites.In an interview with BizIT, Expedia's technical director for Southeast Asia, Lorin Kobashigawa-Bates, said the company's flight- booking application is much more flexible today than it was three years ago."Expedia is a 15-year- old company, and so we have code that is just as old. Back then, the code wasn't designed to be flexible, and a lot of it is written from scratch. So when you hire someone off the street, there is a long learning curve for them," he explained.Over the past three years, Expedia has invested heavily in its tech team and in modernising its Web code. This has helped accelerate the time-to-market for new features and services on the website, in order to stay fresh in light of growing competition."Almost our entire app has been rewritten over the past few years. We emphasised speed-to-market, and now huge chunks of our development process are automated," the technical director said. This speed-to-market is important because the company wants to tap customer feedback as soon as possible, so that it can refine its app faster, he added."The process of overhauling was a bit rough at first, and these investments were a huge spend in the IT department," he said.But crossing that initial hump has paid off, because the Expedia team is able to much more quickly build mobile products and reuse large components of its Web kit for mobile platforms, he said.This has been timely, because the mobile space has taken off in a big way in the past few years. "The mobile space is a whole new market that迷你倉wasn't there before, such as last-minute hotel bookings which are made on the go," he said.As a result, the volume of deals targeted at mobile users continues to grow, he said.And in Southeast Asia, where credit card penetration and desktop online penetration remains low, the mobile provides a gateway to a new market of mobile- first users, he noted.Mr Kobashigawa-Bates heads software development for Expedia.com Asia-Pacific, as well as Air- AsiaGo.com. AirAsiaGo is the portal that was formed through a partnership with Malaysian low-cost carrier AirAsia. The two companies also have an exclusive third-party arrangement to distribute AirAsia's flights only through Expedia.Such arrangements are possible because of Expedia's size and clout in the market, which help it stay ahead of the smaller competition, he said."While there has been an explosion in the number of meta-searchers out there, it's harder to re-create an Expedia because we have so many tight supplier relationships," he said.But one of the challenges facing the tech team in trying to be aggressive in Asia is that all of Expedia's data centres are in the US. The team decided to launch on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has a data centre in Singapore, in order for its site to load faster because it's being served out of a geographically nearer data centre to customers."Speed of loading really matters. We deal with live, on-the-minute price fluctuations," and the company relies on regional hosting partners to keep its website performance snappy, Mr Kobashigawa-Bates said.His team for Southeast Asia is spread out over the region, with 12 developers in Singapore, eight in Gurgaon, India, and 18 in Shenzhen, China. The team's main function is to customise the company's products for the Asian market.The team is now working on bringing the company's Scratchpad product to Asia, scheduled for next year.Scratchpad is a feature on Expedia that it launched just late this year. It allows users to save hotels and flights onto one page, so that they can come back and review their research done on prices."It sounds simple, but a lot of work on the backend needs to be done, because the Scratchpad remembers your searches, and live-updates prices. We need to present that data in a rapid and interactive manner, which requires a lot of muscle on backend servers," he said, noting again the company's reliance on the AWS cloud for that performance boost.self storage