Case Study: Holiday Extras achieves faster, more reliable finance operations and 50% lower hosting costs with Amazon Web Services

Holiday Extras Moves Finance Application to AWS

Holiday Extras is a UK travel‑services provider handling millions of bookings for airport parking, hotels, insurance and more. Needing a more responsive finance platform and faster provisioning than its collocated host could provide, the company wanted to move its new OpenAccounts finance system off local servers after experiencing poor performance, slow capacity upgrades and unreliable, out‑of‑date financial data.

Holiday Extras migrated OpenAccounts to AWS (EC2/EBS, S3/Glacier, VPC with Direct Connect) and automated deployments with CloudFormation, enabling secure terminal access and single sign‑on. The move delivered faster, more reliable processing (nightly integrations cut from 15 to 5 minutes; large reports from up to 3 hours to about 1), roughly halved hosting costs, improved scalability and user satisfaction, and gave the finance team better control and quicker workflows.

Holiday Extras

Damien Turner

Strategic Group Head