Gradion built the original search engine in 2007. It became the foundation for a global travel platform serving 40M+ mobile users. 100+ engineers remain embedded today.

The Challenge

In 2007, the client needed to build a travel search engine from the ground up. The technical challenge was significant: real-time aggregation and comparison of flight, hotel, and car rental inventory across a fragmented global supply base, delivered at speed and at scale, with the architecture to support international expansion across dozens of markets and languages. The platform could not afford downtime or degradation at any scale. As the user base grew to tens of millions and the product expanded across 60+ international websites, every layer of the system search indexing, pricing logic, frontend delivery, localization had to evolve continuously without disruption to live operations. Building and retaining sufficient engineering capacity to sustain this level of continuous development, while also serving a global user base around the clock, required a partner with the depth and durability to function as a true embedded team rather than a time-limited vendor.

The Approach

Gradion developed the original search engine technology in 2007. That work became the technical foundation on which the client’s global platform was built and subsequently integrated into the client’s worldwide operations in 2010. The engagement did not end at delivery. Gradion’s team remained embedded as a continuous core development partner, scaling alongside the business as it expanded internationally. When the platform joined one of the world’s largest online travel groups in 2013, the Gradion team was already a structural part of the engineering organization. Today, more than 100 Gradion engineers work as part of the client’s core development team. The scope covers platform maintenance and evolution, feature development, performance optimization, and support for the full range of international websites and language variants. This is not a staff augmentation arrangement Gradion engineers operate inside the client’s product and engineering structure, sharing standards, tooling, and delivery cadence. Sustaining platform quality across 60+ websites and 20 languages, while continuously shipping improvements for 40M+ mobile users, requires engineering consistency over a long time horizon. That is what this partnership has delivered for more than 15 years.