roadsurfer: New platform live in 20 days. Bookings and revenue doubled within a year. Europe’s leading campervan rental marketplace.

The Challenge

By the time Gradion engaged in 2019, roadsurfer’s legacy platform had become a constraint on the business rather than an enabler. The system had grown inefficient: slow for customers navigating the booking flow, burdensome for internal teams managing fleet, events, and station operations through the back office, and increasingly misaligned with the technical needs of a company scaling rapidly across European markets. Customer-facing friction was the most visible symptom. The booking experience did not reflect the quality of the product being sold. Conversion was being undermined by a front-end that hadn’t kept pace with roadsurfer’s market ambitions. Internally, the back-office tools required to manage station operations, vehicle readiness, and sales events were equally limited. Operational overhead was growing in proportion to fleet and location expansion, and the tools available to the team were not equipped to absorb that growth efficiently. The platform replacement had to be executed without disrupting active business operations. Roadsurfer could not afford downtime during the transition - the rental business runs continuously, and any migration failure would have immediate commercial consequences. The new and legacy systems needed to run in synchronized parallel until cutover was complete.

The Approach

Gradion began the engagement in 2019, embedded directly within roadsurfer’s in-house product and engineering teams. The partnership model was not time-boxed: Gradion engineers augmented roadsurfer’s internal capability on an ongoing basis, with the modernization project as the initial high-priority deliverable. The new platform was built across four interconnected workstreams: Customer booking page: A clean, intuitive booking interface supporting 8 languages and 7 currencies, tied to station-level pricing and availability. The redesign targeted conversion improvement as a primary outcome. Back-office system: A purpose-built operational tool enabling roadsurfer employees to manage station vehicles, plan events, handle fleet status tracking, and coordinate vehicle pickup management. The system was designed to absorb fleet and location growth without proportional overhead increase. Legacy data migration: All historical operational data was safely migrated into the new platform. The migration was managed to run without service interruption, maintaining synchronization between legacy and new systems throughout the transition period. CI/CD implementation: A continuous integration and deployment pipeline was introduced to support agile development cadence and continuous improvement post-launch. This established the technical foundation for roadsurfer to iterate on the platform rapidly after go-live. The customer account page was also delivered as part of the scope: post-booking, customers can access and manage their reservations directly.