Case Study: Wanderu achieves fast, scalable intercity travel search and recommendations with Neo4j

Neo4j Frees Travelers to Wanderu Across America

Wanderu is a travel search and booking platform that aggregates millions of bus and train itineraries and integrates local transit, walking and biking directions to help users book inter-city travel across the US. Its core challenge was collecting, standardizing and connecting disparate data from carriers and public sources—work that proved ill-suited to conventional relational databases and expensive self-joins.

Wanderu kept its MongoDB store for raw data and added Neo4j for fast path-finding, linking the two with a mongo-connector/ETL workflow so Neo4j could perform graph traversals and a custom shortest-path variation. The result: Neo4j efficiently handles an inventory of millions of trips and ~1M users per month without extra caching, delivers better travel recommendations, and provides a scalable platform for future personalization and richer graph-driven features.

Wanderu

Eddy Wong

CTO, Co-Founder