Hotel search personalization
Room Key leverages the scalability and simplicity of Datomic to serve millions of customer visits.
Room Key (Roomkey.com) operates as a joint venture among six major hotel chains, assisting travelers in locating accommodations at competitive prices. The platform simultaneously provides hoteliers with a distribution channel to showcase properties with current information and foster direct guest relationships. The company has developed an optimized hotel meta search engine that processes high volumes of user searches and converts them into bookings.
The Data Challenge
Room Key selected Datomic Pro to capture and store search information from partner hotel websites. When users search on a partner site but leave without booking, they encounter a co-branded Room Key window presenting additional matching options. The platform processes approximately 14–17 million such pages monthly, with an average of over 1.5 million events in 24 hours, at a peak rate of 30 events per second.
Powering Urgency Messaging
Datomic enables data mining and feedback capabilities for Room Key’s platform. The system powers urgency messaging that alerts users when hotels experience high booking volumes, managing 120 million events per month for this feature alone.
Elastic Scaling
Datomic’s elastic architecture allows Room Key to dynamically manage traffic spikes without maintaining unnecessary capacity during slower periods. The separation of transactors and peers ensures site availability by caching data locally, allowing continued operation when transactors experience downtime. Testing has demonstrated performance stability at 10× the current capacity with no performance degradation.
Room Key plans to expand Datomic Pro usage to power additional website features.