› TRAVEL & HOSPITALITY

Travel platforms that ship through Tuesday morning, every Tuesday morning.

We embed senior engineers inside travel media, OTAs and member-platform operators. Sub-2-second redirect targets, daily editorial cadence, member-cycle reliability — built and scaled across engagements that range from a 14-year travel-deals partnership to multi-year association platforms.

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YEARS 14yrs LONGEST TRAVEL ENGAGEMENT

AUDIENCE M+ MONTHLY READERS / SUBSCRIBERS

REDIRECT <2s POST-CLICK PARTNER HAND-OFF

CADENCE 7d WEEKLY DEALS NEWSLETTER

Two shapes of travel team we tend to be a good fit for.

Travel isn't one audience. The way we engage with a US travel-deals platform handling millions of subscribers looks different to a European tourism association running member benefits — but the operating model is the same: senior engineers, embedded, owning the heartbeat.

› TRAVEL MEDIA & MARKETPLACES

Travel-media platforms and OTAs scaling reader and booking volume.

You ship a daily editorial cadence and route millions of clicks to partners. The unsexy parts — post-click redirects, inventory sync, ad retargeting — decide whether you keep the revenue or leak it. We've been the engineering team behind that for fourteen years on one of the larger US travel-deals platforms.

TYPICAL: 6+ MONTH ENGAGEMENTS · MILLIONS OF SUBSCRIBERS · SUB-2S TARGETS

› ASSOCIATIONS & MEMBER PLATFORMS

Industry associations and member-driven travel platforms.

Membership management, billing, content, member-restricted areas, integrations with Mailchimp / S3 / partner systems. The product needs to keep working when Brussels changes a regulation or the membership doubles overnight. Stable engineering team that doesn't depend on one Heroku one-pager.

TYPICAL: 2–5 YEAR ENGAGEMENTS · MEMBERSHIP CYCLES · INTEGRATION-HEAVY

Three product shapes we keep coming back to.

Most travel engagements land in one of three categories — sometimes two or three of them in the same product. The hard parts are usually invisible until they break a release.

Travel platforms and booking flows.

Editorial CMSes that scale, deal pipelines, partner-redirect interstitial pages tuned for sub-2-second performance, ad retargeting, recommendation engines. The hard parts are the ones nobody sees — until they break a Tuesday-morning newsletter send.

EXAMPLES: CMS · Deal pipelines · Redirect optimisation

Member platforms and back-office.

Membership management, billing administration, member-restricted areas, Mailchimp integration, async queues, document/PDF export, role and permission management. Built for a non-technical client to run, not for an engineer to babysit.

EXAMPLES: Member CMS · Billing · Mailchimp · Async queues

Mobile experiences for travel & destinations.

Storytelling-driven mobile apps for families on the go: city-game style apps with augmented reality, sticker albums, in-app purchases. Where the engagement is shorter and the polish bar is higher. Native iOS / SpriteKit / Firebase under the hood.

EXAMPLES: iOS native · AR · Family travel

The day-2 problems we tend to land on.

Travel platforms look fine until peak season, a partner-feed change, or a migration shows up. These are the problem shapes we've owned — across editorial-driven travel media, member-platform operations, and mobile travel experiences.

PEAK CYCLES

Tuesday newsletter sends, holiday spikes.

Travel media has a heartbeat — daily eblasts, weekly flagship deals, holiday surges. Built to absorb the spike without queue-of-death, with millisecond redirect targets even at thousands of concurrent requests.

CACHED · QUEUED · TESTED

REVENUE PATH

The post-click redirect, optimised.

Travel-media revenue depends on a 2-second redirect: the user clicks, the system captures source + analytics, then bounces them to the partner. Every millisecond after that is leaked margin. We've tuned this path for years.

SUB-2S · ANALYTICS-FIRST

PLATFORM AGE

Migrations without taking the newsletter offline.

WordPress → Rails. PHP → Rails. Heroku → AWS. Travel-media platforms accumulate a decade of editorial content — migrations have to keep the publishing rhythm, not freeze it. We migrate in flight.

MIGRATION · PHASED

INTEGRATIONS

Partners, CRMs, payment systems.

Mailchimp, AWS S3, partner-deal feeds, payment processors, retargeting pixels. The boring integration plumbing is where most travel platforms quietly fall apart.

INTEGRATION-HEAVY

The stack we ship every week. Boring tech, picked on purpose.

Rails for the editorial CMS and deal-management core. Elasticsearch for search at audience scale. AWS Lambda for the redirect path. MongoDB / MySQL where the data model fits. Native iOS where consumer polish matters.

Ruby on RailsEditorial · Backend

ElasticsearchSearch · Discovery

AWS LambdaEdge · Redirects

MongoDBDocument store

MySQLRelational

HerokuHosting · members

SwiftiOS native

MailchimpEmail · CRM

ShermansTravel — 14 years building a travel platform that ships at scale.

From a WordPress newsroom to a Rails platform — and on through fourteen years of compound scaling.

ShermansTravel built a devoted audience among travellers hunting the best deals on flights, hotels, packages and cruises. By the early 2010s the original WordPress / PHP stack was creaking under the load of daily eblasts to millions of subscribers. We migrated the platform to Rails, then stayed for the scaling work.

The unsexy load-bearing detail: the post-click intermediary page. When a subscriber clicks a deal, the redirect captures user information and traffic source instantly, then bounces them to the partner site — under 2 seconds, every click. The flagship weekly deals email lands on time, every Tuesday morning.

SCOPECMS · Deals · Redirects · Newsletter

STACKRails · Elasticsearch · AWS · MongoDB

PERFORMANCESub-2s redirect under load

ENGAGEMENTSince 2011 · same partnership

Read the full case study

"Runtime has always been more than a development team. It is a strategic business partner that provides technology direction, recommendations, and solutions."

MARK BLOOM · PRESIDENT · SHERMANSTRAVEL

INDUSTRY: Online Travel
TIMELINE: Since 2011
CORE TECHNOLOGY: Rails · Elasticsearch

How a travel engagement runs — from first call to shipped.

The exact shape varies with the platform, the audience and the cadence. The four steps are consistent in every travel engagement we run.

DISCOVERY

Discovery — what makes this platform different.

We sit with editorial, ops, and the marketing team — wherever the daily heartbeat lives. Map the traffic shape, the partner relationships, the slow-and-fragile parts. Two weeks of looking.

WEEK 1–2

DESIGN

Design with the editorial cadence.

UX work runs alongside discovery. Wireframes validated with the editors and customer-support team who run the day-to-day. We design for the cadence the team already runs, not the one a template assumes.

WEEK 2–6

BUILD

Build inside your stack — and keep the heartbeat.

We don't replatform you. We integrate, extend, replace pieces in flight. Tuesday newsletter goes out on Tuesday. Migrations are phased. The redirect path stays sub-2-second through the rebuild.

WEEK 6–[X]

SHIP & EVOLVE

Ship, then keep going.

Phased rollout, regression suite the in-house team can run, monitoring tuned to the metrics editorial actually cares about. Long engagement is by mutual choice — our longest is fourteen years and counting.

ONGOING

Building or scaling a travel platform?

Tell us where the cadence is breaking, where the redirect is leaking, where the migration is stuck. Thirty minutes is usually enough for both sides to know whether this is a good fit.

Book the call [email protected]