Search functionality

Client: www.corendon.nl

Challenge

Being one of the largest tour operators in the Netherlands, Corendon offers a broad range of holidays to their customers. And being a direct seller, it is important that these customers can easily search and find their dream holiday.

For Corendon, this search solution had 3 main challenges:

  1. The scale of it, the goal is to allow searching on trip level and Corendon has about 200 million trips due to all kinds of variations (departure date, duration, meal plan, flight, etc.).
  2. The fact that price and availability data are continuously changing, resulting in a large stream of data updates.
  3. The number of users that use the search, especially during peak load.

Despite these challenges, offering super-fast search is very important as waiting times will lower conversion.

For the best user experience throughout the webflow, the cheapest price will be shown first. And in the next step the user can flow into the more extensive price feature when needed. Allowing the user to check exact prices and finally make a booking. Data quality is crucial in this process.

Solution

The solution was a custom search index built using SolR one of the most popular, blazing-fast, open-source enterprise search platforms built on Apache Lucene™. This solution is highly reliable,scalable and future proof. High volume searches are easily handled and searching through a few tens of millions of trips is done in around a 10th of a second. It is also very capable to deal with the many updates we have to process..