Most OTAs mask the latency from third party searches with animation, ads or progressive loading. However, with over 75% of our searches coming from faceless API engines, there’s little room for gimmicks. Could we provide faster results without hurting conversion levels?

1. Sub-second
search in
a week

2. Last minute = impatience
26%
16%
10%
<1 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 weeks

3. Over 75% of our
searches come from
faceless API engines,
where there’s little
room for gimmicks
Musafir UAE 2016-17

4. Seven seconds
Transfer 2%
Connect 4%
Process 4%
Price 13%
Search 77%

5. Almost all OTAs mask the
latency with animation, ads
or progressive loading.
Could we provide faster
results without hurting
conversion levels?

6. Dynamic
cache
Customer
tiers
Proactive
replenish
Purpose-
built
Parallel
everything

7. Dynamic cache
<1 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 weeks

8. By tiering our cache,
we offered fresher
results to our top tier
customers, while still
maintaining KPIs
Musafir

9. Proactive replenish
Search ···
Replenish ···
-50 50 150 250 350 450 550 650
Roger
Ahmed

10. Migrating from a
conventional database
to a purpose-built store
like Redis improved
cache performance
by up to 60%
Musafir

11. It’s the little things
we took for granted
that came back to haunt
us. We now parallel
process everything
from login to pricing.
Musafir

12. Over 50% sub-second
55%
13%
<1 2 4 6 8 seconds
After Before

13. Discrete
cache
Predictive
replenish ···
··· ···

14. “This is … where people
would get you a doctor and
put you in a nice little room
where you were safe and
can’t hurt anyone”
James Hamilton
Amazon Web Services

15. Sub-second
search in
a week