Case Study: HotelTonight achieves lightning-fast mobile performance and reduced origin load with Fastly's edge CDN

Hotel Tonight - Customer Case Study

HotelTonight is a mobile-first marketplace for same-day hotel bookings operating in 28 countries with millions of downloads. After rapid global growth they needed to scale and speed up a location-driven, dynamic API without rewriting their platform — accurately grouping users by proximity, reducing unique requests, and lowering origin load while keeping the app highly responsive.

They implemented Fastly’s CDN with custom VCL, surrogate-key purging, edge URL rewrites and geo-fenced URLs to cache dynamic API responses and normalize device-request variations. The result was a much higher cache hit ratio, origin traffic reductions sometimes over 80%, warm-cache responses under 50 ms, fewer origin servers to handle peaks (e.g., New Year’s traffic) and the operational freedom to focus on product innovation.

Hotel Tonight

Sam MacDonnell

CTO