A novel use of Elasticsearch in the context of holiday search, not as a traditional store of persistent documents, but as a rolling cache of transient holiday packages. This puts unique demands on Elasticsearch in terms of index and deletion rate, concurrent to a high query rate.

Figures below are from February 2014, so will have changed.

Fancy a holiday?

The travel industry works around the principal of ‘dynamic packaging’ of holidays. When you search for a holiday from any London airport to the Caribbean in a 4+ star hotel, separate databases of flight availability and hotel availability are combined to produce an up to the minute ‘package’ meeting your requested criteria.