Amazon QLDB For Online Booking – Our Experience After 3 Years In Production
Back in 2021, my cofounders and I started a business to simplify building internet booking experiences. We think that online booking for hotels and vacation rentals is broken for both consumers and producers and created LODGEA as the Shopify for hotels and vacation rentals. It includes a fully flexible geospatial timeries vector search engine for consumers and e-commerce at the push of a button for producers — i.e. hoteliers, hotel chains, vacation rental managers and agencies. The journey of building LODGEA took us to Amazon QLDB. A journey I’ll share with you today.
The traditional approach for online booking is to have a relational database management system for online transaction processing (OLTP). Availability searches, price queries and bookings (transactions) would all be centralized in that OLTP database.
Availability and prices differ based on the travel dates, the length of stay, number of guests, cancellation policies, board and room types. It’s absolutely common for a single hotel to have more than 500,000 price variations for a full year of availability data. With 100+ hotels in the database, the records can easily climb to hundreds of millions. If that’s not enough, the availability is also updated several times a day and whenever a booking is made.
