For unforgettable travel experiences, the industry needs a first-class upgrade

Introduction

The travel industry is dealing with significant infrastructure challenges affecting its efficiency and ability to keep up with increasing customer demands. Many travel infrastructure systems were built on and still rely on outdated technology, limiting their ability to adapt to modern demands. This includes everything from outdated reservation systems to inadequate online security measures, which can expose travelers and businesses to data breaches and operational disruptions. The slow adoption of cutting-edge technologies and automated services further hampers the industry's ability to streamline operations and enhance the customer experience. 

IT Infrastructure: An industry tipping point

Although the travel industry relies heavily on technology for managing reservations, ticketing, customer service, logistics, loyalty programs, and more, many face significant IT challenges due to outdated and complex systems. These legacy systems, some developed decades ago, are inflexible, expensive to maintain, and often do not integrate well with newer solutions. As a result, they hinder innovation, increase overall cost, and are, therefore, likely to result in worse customer experiences. Built for specific tasks, they struggle to adapt to new business requirements. Such inflexibility can also create organizational silos, making it difficult to share data across departments or platforms, and maintaining and updating these legacy systems is costly and time-consuming, diverting resources from strategic initiatives.

While there are no hard and fast rules, online organizations with legacy IT systems often prioritize maintaining stability and familiarity. They aim to minimize disruptions and ensure operational continuity, fearing that major changes could lead to unforeseen issues. By adopting contemporary technologies, companies can reduce online threats and streamline operations through automation. They can quickly adapt to market changes and additionally, modern systems can provide better support for data analytics and decision-making, giving companies a competitive edge. Also, a modern infrastructure should let you quickly roll back or invalidate new code that isn’t performing as expected and, as such, encourage innovation and experimentation. While the transition might seem daunting, the long-term advantages of upgrading far outweigh the short-term challenges, ultimately leading to greater innovation and growth.

Benefiting from open systems

Integrating open API-friendly systems is crucial for the travel & hospitality industry as they enable software applications to communicate, facilitating seamless data exchange and interoperability. By adopting open APIs, online travel companies will benefit from enhanced connectivity to allow for smooth integration with third-party services as well as streamlined operations and much improved customer experiences. Greater flexibility in these systems makes them more modular and adaptable, allowing companies to easily add new functionalities or services as needed, which is essential in a rapidly changing industry.

While APIs will help travel & hospitality organizations with interoperability and data exchanges, another benefit lies with CDNs that support API caching. Real-time data access is vital for services like booking flights, hotels, and rental cars. A CDN with API caching can significantly improve the overall performance and reliability by reducing latency and ensuring faster response times. This is especially important for today’s global users who require immediate access to the most up-to-date information. Additionally, API caching can help handle traffic spikes during busy booking seasons, thereby guaranteeing a smooth user experience. By relieving requests from the origin servers, it also boosts security and reduces the risk of server overloads and costly downtime. Ultimately, the result is improved customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and a competitive advantage in a highly competitive industry where its players must never lose focus on delivering stellar user experiences. 

The above is reason enough to move to an API-first approach, but driving better performance with APIs can also increase revenue and decrease significant costs like egress charges. 

A better CDN improves your bottom line

Slow performance on travel websites significantly hampers the user experience and overall efficiency. When pages take too long to load, potential customers abandon their search (Google study), leading to lost revenue. Slow response times can be particularly detrimental during peak booking periods when the volume of visitors surges. Moreover, sluggish websites can undermine customer trust and satisfaction. Delays in fetching and displaying search results, booking confirmations, or processing payments easily frustrate travelers and drive them to competitors with faster and more reliable platforms. Additionally, slow performance can complicate real-time data integration, such as flight status updates or dynamic pricing, further diminishing the website's functionality and the user’s ability to make informed travel decisions. In an industry as competitive as this, ensuring that travel websites operate swiftly and efficiently is crucial for maintaining a strong customer base and driving business growth.

Today, a good CDN offers several benefits, including improved website performance, enhanced security, and increased reliability. By spreading content across a network of globally dispersed servers, a CDN ensures that users can access data from the nearest server, reducing latency and load times significantly. This results in a faster, more responsive website, which can improve user experience and reduce bounce rates. CDNs also provide robust security features, such as DDoS protection, SSL/TLS encryption, and web application firewalls, safeguarding websites against cyber threats. Additionally, CDNs improve reliability by distributing the load across multiple servers, ensuring high availability and uptime even during traffic spikes or server failures. The mix of speed, security, and reliability makes a good CDN an essential component for any website aiming to deliver optimal performance and user satisfaction.

The improved reliability and availability of a website supported by a CDN also contribute to financial gains. A website that remains accessible during high traffic times ensures continuous revenue generation without interruptions. This reliability can cultivate trust and loyalty among customers, encouraging repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals, which are valuable for long-term financial health. 

CDNs enhance the scalability, reliability, and performance of requests in a way that can drive revenue with better conversion rates, but the best CDNs can also reduce your costs by significantly cutting your egress traffic and charges. Below, you can see how a 5% improvement in CDN offload performance can mean a 50% load reduction at the origin.

Performance brings Increased loyalty and customer satisfaction

Using a CDN offers significant performance benefits. One key advantage for the travel and hospitality industry is reduced online latency, crucial for websites serving a worldwide audience. Distributing content across multiple servers in different locations, a CDN ensures data is delivered from the closest server to the user and minimizes load times for web pages, images, and media. This provides a faster browsing experience, crucial for travelers trying to make bookings. A responsive web outlet is particularly important during traffic spikes during holidays or special events, ensuring the website remains responsive even under heavy loads. Furthermore, enhanced site performance leads to improved rankings, as search engines prioritize fast-loading websites. Higher rankings can drive more organic traffic to the site, reducing the dependency on paid advertising and lowering customer acquisition costs.

Improving the customer experience directly affects the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a key customer loyalty and satisfaction metric. A lower latency and better-performing website reduces frustration and increases the likelihood that customers will return and recommend the service to others. Specifically for travel & hospitality, a high NPS can be a significant advantage, driving word-of-mouth referrals and repeat business. Using a CDN can directly improve operational efficiency and foster strong relationships with customers, ultimately boosting a company's reputation and market share.

Strawberry's future-proof website loads 40% faster with Fastly; improves UX by 66%

By switching to a modern CDN and WAF, the Scandinavian hotel chain Strawberry was able to both extend the life cycles of legacy web servers and significantly speed up its website delivery in the process.

Read more

Hotel website performance in the real world is lagging

As with most of our previous 2024 industry reports, we utilized Google’s CrUX dataset to analyze 173 unique hotel websites taken from the Chain-Brand Hotels Wikipedia page. Surprisingly, the majority (73%) were not able to clinch the highest score, indicating that their Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score exceeded 2.5 seconds. Notably, 28% of those sites had an LCP score of 4.0 seconds or slower.

These results highlight a significant issue in the travel and hospitality industry: the crucial need for improved online experiences. LCP measures how quickly the main content of a webpage loads and is essential for user satisfaction. Slow LCP times can lead to higher bounce rates and lost bookings, frustrating potential customers. In a digital-first era, hotels must prioritize website optimization to ensure fast, seamless user experiences. For more information, see our methodology page.

The industry will benefit greatly from implementing performance best practices, such as efficient coding, proper image optimization, and leveraging better Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) in smarter ways. By doing so, hotels can enhance user engagement, improve search engine rankings, and ultimately drive more conversions. The industry needs to understand that a strong online presence is just as essential as exceptional in-person service in today's competitive market.

In the chart below, we have chosen to include the data we found for Digital Publishing. The online publishing industry is, if any, built on archaic foundations that we didn’t expect to perform well. However, as an industry, they have to perform at their very best to secure subscribers, ad revenue, and prominent placement at the news aggregators. As an industry, they solved the task and you can see that they perform exceptionally well by comparison. In other words: having an ultra-responsive website with all the benefits that come along is possible through the adoption of modern technology.

Source for hotel sites: Chained-brand hotels (173 sites - URLs with common origin were combined)

Why security must be top of mind

The online travel and hospitality industry is placing greater emphasis on providing top-notch customer experiences by investing in secure websites and robust data protection measures. This emphasis is driven by the recognition that customer trust and safety are of utmost importance in building satisfaction and loyalty. Through the implementation of advanced security protocols and the protection of personal information, companies in this sector aim to offer smooth and worry-free booking experiences, ultimately improving their reputation and retaining customers.

Loyalty programs in the travel and hospitality industry hold significant monetary value, acting as powerful tools for customer retention and driving repeat business. They translate directly to monetary value for the traveler by offering exclusive discounts, free upgrades, and rewards that reduce overall travel expenses. Given their worth both to the traveler and the travel company, online travel websites must prioritize robust security measures to protect loyalty program data from cyber threats. Ensuring the integrity and confidentiality of customer information not only maintains trust but also safeguards the financial investment made in cultivating loyal customers, ultimately contributing to sustained revenue growth and competitive advantage in the market.

Outdated security can put many customers on a journey with your competitor. Vulnerable, legacy security can expose your website, applications, and customers’ personally identifiable information PII) to a breach. For an airline or hotel, customer loyalty is crucial to the bottom line. Loyalty programs entice and retain customers via rewards, which are cash equivalents. So account takeovers and other breaches can have a direct financial impact on your most loyal customer base. Repeat business is a key revenue driver, and a security breach can quickly sink reputations and loyalties and damage customers’ identities.

A bot attack can bring online operations to a halt by overloading your site with traffic and stealing sensitive information that can be sold on the dark web. With attackers using AI and machine learning, malicious bots are getting harder to detect, block, and prevent. Even an unscrupulous competitor can scrape your sensitive data, such as your demand-based pricing fluctuations.  

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks continue to be a weapon of choice by bad actors. They disrupt website functionality by breaching security protocols to sensitive information, crippling your website, disrupting network operations, and encrypting your data with a ransomware attack.

Five Security Capabilities Worth the Switching Costs

Today, the travel industry must adopt modern security to prevent data breaches. The best security offers ease of use, accuracy, and advanced threat intelligence. Organizations relying on outdated legacy security technology can miss the latest advances in Web Access Firewall (WAF) and bot management solutions. Today’s advanced capabilities can make your life (and your customers) much easier, safer, and more productive.  

1. Smooth, fast deployment in any environment

Your new solution needs to be deployed quickly, and protection should start in minutes. A good sign is if there are a large number of existing customers who can attest to this experience. For example, ease of deployment is core to Fastly, and our Next-Gen WAF can be up and running in less than ten minutes.

Enabling DevOps teams to speed policy and rule changes for application security threat mitigation (such as custom signals or rate limit rules) becomes increasingly important, especially in the face of a dynamic, evolving threat landscape. 

Speed and automation translate into a stronger security policy in the face of evolving web threats. Teams can adapt more quickly and less rely on human error to update rules to prevent attacks. 

Time-to-protection should be extremely fast, both at the time of deployment and when responding to new threats. You will get immediate answers to basic questions like “Why are we experiencing this traffic peak?” and “Is this traffic legitimate or not?”

2. Ease of use and control

Flexibility allows your developers to improve DevSecOps workflow for their development processes. Ease of use means having a unified experience and flexibility to deploy in any infrastructure and to gain observability across all environments with a single pane of glass. This means you can operate across cloud, container, on-premise data centers, hybrid environments, or at the edge, and be assured that you can make architecture decisions without involving a new security headache.

Today’s security solutions offer more control. Configuration and rule changes can be made quickly, confidently, and safely. Legacy products can produce bottlenecks that may require extensive professional services to handle even basic security capabilities.  

3. Easy rule-building and maintenance without false positives

Building and deploying an effective new rule with confidence that it isn’t creating new false positives should take minutes. These tools should be flexible to build rules that address whatever you discover. Regex rules can be useful, and you may continue to use them as part of your protection, but you need simpler ways to quickly block new threats as soon as you’ve identified them.

False positives could be a sign that you’re using an outdated Web Access Firewall (WAF). Modern, out-of-the-box WAF technology can make it easier to block accurately without false positives and other inaccuracies. It can help you maintain a strong security posture without sacrificing performance. You will be able to respond in real time to new threats.

4. Integrated bot management 

Advanced threat intelligence capabilities can proactively block threats before they even make a request or reach your WAF. Large chunks of illegitimate traffic, once difficult to identify, can easily be blocked with modern WAF technology, reducing traffic to and from your origin.

As mentioned earlier, bots can be benign or malicious and highly damaging. An effective integrated bot management solution will allow you to quickly differentiate legitimate users from malicious attackers.

5. Observability with real insights and quick resolution

Real-time dashboards of your data provide insights from the moment you turn your solution on. They simplify what is happening, why it’s happening, and how to quickly resolve issues. This capability is getting organizations to review their strategies and can relieve costly resources better used elsewhere. 

Your access shouldn’t be limited to dashboards, professional services requests, batch reports, or in any other way. You need access to real-time logs and all of your data and the ability to stream it wherever you want. It’s your data, and you should have access to all of it.

Real-time insights must be followed up with high quality support. Security issues must be resolved quickly and with solutions that keep the data, reputation, and operations secure. Customer support can’t be a bottleneck. Long resolution times after a vulnerability is identified can leave your organization at greater risk. Knowing the underlying cause of a threat or exploit helps prevent its recurrence.

Platform security advantages

The five security capabilities listed above can help clarify and justify the need to update your security processes. Cross-platform benefits improve your security posture with a move to a better edge cloud platform. You can start to think of your cache hit ratio and origin offload as a kind of security metric because of how it allows you to shrink your attack surface at the origin. When edge computing is highly secure, the benefits are numerous. Fastly’s per-request isolation and sandboxing allow workloads performed at the edge to strengthen your security. Better CI/CD integrations also ensure more complete coverage and easier DevSecOps. 

To learn more, check out the AppSec Guide to Multi-Layer Security.

Conclusion

For an industry that caters to an audience seeking unforgettable experiences, it’s almost ironic that the first step of booking a journey leaves so much to be desired

Our findings highlight a significant challenge facing the travel & hospitality industry: the painfully slow performance of online travel websites likely caused by outdated and possibly overloaded IT systems. The inefficiency is sure to not only frustrate users but also undermine the potential for higher engagement and conversions. 

The industry stands at a pivotal moment where a substantial upgrade can lead to transformative improvements in customer experience. 

To create enhanced user experiences on the web, you’ll need uncompromising speed and agility. By investing in a comprehensive network edge platform, optimizing website performance, and embracing digital innovation, travel and hospitality businesses can meet the evolving expectations of today's travelers, driving satisfaction, loyalty, and growth in a highly competitive market. The time for action is now, and those who lead the charge in modernization will undoubtedly reap the rewards. 

For more information on Fastly’s solutions for the travel & hospitality industry, visit our dedicated solutions page.