Hotel search personalization - Room Key leverages the scalability and simplicity of Datomic to serve millions of customer visits.
Datomic was selected by Room Key to solve for both current data volumes and future growth and complexity.
Room Key (Roomkey.com) is a joint venture of 6 large hotel chains whose mission is to help travelers find the right hotel in the right place at the right price. Room Key also provides hoteliers a distribution channel, which enables them to present their properties with the most current and accurate information and maintain a direct relationship with the guest. Room Key has created an optimized online hotel meta search engine, which captures, analyzes and responds to high volumes of user searches and converts these directly into hotel bookings.
Room Key chose Datomic Pro to capture and store information from user searches on founding hotel partner sites. If a user performs a search on a partner hotel website, but then chooses to leave this site without booking a stay, the individual is presented a Room Key co-branded interstitial window, offering the user additional hotel options which match his or her search criteria and travel requirements. Room Key collects data from roughly 14-17 million such pages monthly, with each one generating additional user data that is stored and tracked in Datomic. On a typical day, Room Key records an average of over 1.5 million events in 24 hours, at a peak rate of 30 events per second.
Datomic makes this data available for data mining and feedback to the site. For example, Room Key’s urgency messaging alerts a user that a hotel is experiencing a high volume of bookings and he or she may risk losing the selected room if it is not quickly booked. For urgency messaging alone, Room Key is managing 120 million events per month.
Datomic was selected by Room Key to solve for both current data volumes and future growth and complexity. Because of the elasticity built into Datomic’s management of transactors and peers, Room Key has the ability to dynamically manage spikes in user and event data volume without paying for unneeded capacity during slower times.
Also critical to Room Key’s success is site availability. By separating transactors and peers, Datomic caches data locally, which allows peers to keep data available even when transactors are down. Datomic has been tested at 10X the current capacity with no performance degradation.
In the future, Room Key plans to expand their use of Datomic Pro to power a host of new features for the website.
