Case Study: Holiday Extras halves IT hardware costs and speeds end-user response times 20% with Amazon Web Services

Holiday Extras - Customer Case Study

Holiday Extras is a UK travel add‑ons retailer (airport parking, hotels, travel insurance) that served about 8 million travelers in 2011 and set an ambitious £200 million revenue target despite a severe industry downturn. The company faced extreme seasonal traffic peaks and troughs and had already invested over £1.5 million in a customer technology platform, creating a need for greater agility, scalability, and lower fixed infrastructure costs.

Over a nine‑month agile project Holiday Extras moved its customer‑facing sites to AWS, replacing on‑premise blades and MySQL databases with a multi‑AZ deployment of 12 web servers, Amazon RDS, memcached instances, and Elastic Load Balancers, using tools like PHP, TeamCity, and Zabbix. The migration halved IT hardware spending, cut end‑user response times by 20%, and delivered faster time‑to‑market and operational flexibility, enabling the company to scale more cost‑efficiently and focus on customer experience.

Holiday Extras

Nilan Peiris

Chief Marketing Technology Officer