Case Study: Travelstart achieves 43% lower operational costs and improved reliability with Amazon Web Services

Travelstart - Customer Case Study

Travelstart, founded in 1999 with about 200 staff across 15 countries, is one of Africa’s largest online travel booking sites operating across mid‑Africa and the Middle East. The company struggled with an unreliable previous cloud provider that caused networking problems, poor elasticity, high costs, and slow time to market—issues that hindered rapid expansion and the ability to handle frequent traffic spikes from promotions.

Travelstart migrated its mid‑Africa and Middle East operations to AWS for global reach and reliability, using EC2, RDS, EBS, VPC, S3, and CloudWatch. The migration had no downtime and delivered immediate benefits: easy regional replication, on‑demand scaling for traffic peaks, a 43% reduction in operational costs per market, at least a 25% reduction in downtime, and simpler management—enabling further expansion and planned migration of South Africa operations and additional AWS services.

Travelstart

Jan-André le Roux

Systems Architect