Case Study: Expedia achieves real-time personalized travel and rapid innovation with MongoDB

Expedia - Customer Case Study

Expedia built Scratchpad to simplify the messy, start‑and‑stop process of planning travel—customers often run dozens of searches across devices, forget prior results, and contend with constantly changing inventory and prices. That highly variable, unstructured data and the need for instantaneous, personalized results clashed with the rigidity of traditional relational databases, slowing development and limiting Expedia’s ability to iterate quickly.

By powering Scratchpad with MongoDB’s flexible document model, rich indexes, and horizontal scale-out, Expedia delivered cross‑device, real‑time personalization that remembers searches, surfaces the best prices, and keeps users engaged. A three‑developer team prototyped Scratchpad in under two months and launched production two months later; the feature increased conversions and loyalty, survived three schema overhauls with zero downtime, and is scaling to dozens of markets worldwide.

Expedia

Prashanth Kokati

Senior Software Engineer