TripTech

Technology for the travel, tourism and outdoor industry

About

TripTech is a travel technology company and creator of well-known apps for the road tripping, camping and outdoor adventure sectors. The company also offers data and insights, specializing in collecting and analyzing tourism movements and behaviors to provide real-time actionable insights. These insights engage customers, build brand loyalty, and drive revenue opportunities for the travel and outdoor adventure sectors.

TripTech has a loyal following of mobile users through its free apps CamperMate, thl Road Trip and the Visitors Centers of Australia. Their main focus is on holiday parks, camp sites and things to do where users can plan and book and take these apps on the road. The product line up generates business leads and advertising & content solutions for tourism products and services.

How they use Cloudflare

Before Cloudflare, TripTech’s systems were “expensive”, “clunky”, and “monolithic”. The business was spending huge amounts of money on AWS and had shipped a bunch of features without scalability and maintainability. Because they were so far away from being able to move away from their existing system, they deleted a lot of stuff that wasn’t running, but still cost them money.

Cloudflare enabled TripTech to streamline their backend architecture and delete the monolith. The idea was to create a proxy that would sit between an old service and reroute to a new one. With Cloudflare Workers, TripTech now runs the mobile app BFF on a single Worker. Also, using CronJobs, relevant data stores are updated and then Cloudflare Worker Proxies reroute old monolithic routes and repurpose them seamlessly. On the web, Cloudflare Workers allow campermate.com to easily batch search and hydration calls to provide peak performance.

TripTech also faced challenges using image resizing on prior platforms - whole systems were built around asynchronous image processing and image variants were stored for later in AWS. This was an extremely costly and slow developer and user experience. Cloudflare Images allowed TripTech to manage their images infrastructure at scale while letting the team prioritize refactoring their back and frontend through workers.

Lastly, TripTech has completely shifted data storage to Cloudflare R2. TripTech created a Worker to proxy all image requests and backfilled missing images to R2. Over time all images were migrated using Workers and finally the old connections were deleted as R2 became the source of truth.

Why Cloudflare?

“I started with Cloudflare back in 2012 using the caching at the edge to reduce hosting costs. With TripTech, we moved to Cloudflare as a way of refactoring the monolith. We deleted old functionality and re-wrote what we needed in Workers. This benefited us with zero down time, caching for free, secure APIs, domain-driven design, and a great developer tooling experience.”

“The cool thing about using Workers is that we were able to specifically target which white labels received watermarking and other image features, which was super valuable.”