Case Study: HotelTonight achieves real-time personalized search at scale for millions with Elastic Cloud (Elastic)

Hoteltonight Scales to Millions of Users with Elasticsearch As A Service

HotelTonight is a mobile-first travel app that connects nearly 14 million users with more than 15,000 hotels across 1,900 cities. To deliver personalized, real-time hotel search results—comparing millions of documents with data like dates, prices, ratings and availability—the engineering team needed 24x7 availability, very low-latency queries, and the ability to handle exponential data growth while staying focused on building the core product rather than managing complex ops infrastructure.

By adopting Elastic Cloud (hosted Elasticsearch from the creators of Elasticsearch), HotelTonight achieved predictable sub-30ms query performance, easy integration with MySQL and other data sources, flexible cluster scaling, and premium support. The solution enabled rapid development of ranking algorithms, reliable real-time personalization at scale, and better allocation of internal dev and ops resources to drive user growth and revenue.

Hotel Tonight

Sam MacDonnell

CTO