Online travel agency case study: Hostelworld

Overview

Hostelworld is the biggest online travel agency that specializes in Hostel stays.

They have more than 36,000 properties in over 178 countries and offer social experiences to predominantly millennial travellers all around the world.

Challenge

Hostelworld, like many companies that have been in business for such a long time, faced a quickly growing tech debt from years of accumulated in-house solutions.

Added to this issue, Hostelworld were looking to build a referral program that would resonate with their user base, but often 3rd party referral services require users to log into external platforms, which creates pain points for the user.

To allow their teams to innovate and create the referral program they wanted without extensive, tedious development and rigorous testing, Hostelworld needed a new and improved promotion solution.

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Hostelworld needed a solution that:

Could replace their outdated legacy system completely
Let them roll out new promotion features as they needed them
Offered a range of promotion features for future campaigns
Integrated alongside their current running promotion solutions

“Switching to Talon.One from our in-house legacy system was a key decision in our strategy to modernize our technology.”

Johnny Quach

CPO at Hostelworld

“Switching to Talon.One from our in-house legacy system was a key decision in our strategy to modernize our technology.”

CPO at Hostelworld

Solution

Hostelworld integrated Talon.One alongside their legacy system, allowing them to iteratively reroute data points and rebuild their credit system.

Customers collect points for purchases and interactions, then can ‘cash out’ their credits as a coupon code with an assigned value.

Now developers don’t have to build any infrastructure and can make big changes fast, while the finance team have a simple reporting system for every credit that’s saved or redeemed.

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