
Customer Story
Efficiency Now and for the Future With a Database Review
This scaling company’s business requirements were no longer being supported by their databases. Together, we changed that.
Case Study
A leading accommodation-only supplier who works with travel agents and tour operators to supply them with the very best quality hotels and resorts around the world.
The Challenge
The Customer
YouTravel.com is a leading accommodation-only supplier who works with travel agents and tour operators to supply them with the very best quality hotels and resorts around the world. The company operates out of eight countries across Europe as well as having a presence in Russia and has over 8,000 accommodations under their portfolio.
Our main project goal was to help YouTravel get more from their existing infrastructure by improving performance and identifying areas to optimise.
We also wanted to support the in-house team. By reducing inefficiencies, YouTravel would have time to focus on more meaningful projects.
The solution was clear: simplify, then tune. Our two-phased approach first saw the xTEN team carry out a Database Review which garnered a detailed report of issues and steps needed for remediation. From there, we worked with their inhouse team to create a plan of action for the simplification process, which, once complete, created a reliable, strong foundation for the next phase: tuning.
Phase two saw the isolation and remediation of the biggest offenders when it came to business impact. This allowed us to make a huge difference in the smallest amount of time, and the business began to see the benefits of our relationship after just days of working together.
YouTravel hugely improved their golden ‘look to book’ ratio, a standard in the travel industry which pins the number of customers visiting a site against the level of conversions.
This was a result of reducing the key response times by 90% producing drastically faster search results.
YouTravel also made savings in server costs. New-found efficiencies in database management meant they could spend much less on hosting. A 95% reduction of SQL Server instances delivered a significant return on investment.
The YouTravel.com IT team have said goodbye to constant firefighting and are now free to work on more interesting projects to further innovate the company’s offering and win new business.