Launch of the HouseTrip platform
HouseTrip grew to become one of the world’s largest private vacation rental platforms and was acquired by TripAdvisor in 2016. makandra supported the product from its early days.
HouseTrip once ranked among the world's leading holiday rental services. Other than with traditional rental websites, tourists were able to rent unused vacation rentals directly from private individuals.
HouseTrip has raised venture capital amounting to 60 million dollars in three investment rounds, including from Index Ventures, Balderton Capital and Accel Partners. HouseTrip was named Switzerland's Startup of the Year twice in a row in 2012 and 2013.
HouseTrip was acquired by TripAdvisor in April 2016.
Industry
Technology
Services
As we operate an online-only business, we are entirely dependent on doing a 100% perfect job on the technical side. This is why we appreciate makandra’s extremely reliable and high quality work.
Our Solution for Housetrip
Successful Platform Development and Long-Term Collaboration
We made a significant contribution to the launch of the platform in 2009. During the early stages, development was handled almost entirely by makandra. After a successful round of VC funding, a team of in-house developers was assembled in London. We worked closely with that team until 2015.
During that period, we worked on many different aspects of the HouseTrip platform, from implementing the frontend design and integrating various API endpoints, to mapping complex business processes and analyzing large datasets for TV campaigns. makandra was also responsible for operating the platform on continuously growing infrastructure.
Between 2009 and 2015 makandra delivered approximately 3000 person days to HouseTrip.
Operations on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
In addition to our Ruby development services we designed large parts of HouseTrip's system architecture. We operated the platform between 2010 and 2014.
Several dozen application servers for various services were provisioned and configured on EC2. ELB was used to distribute requests, data storage was provided through RDS and ElastiCache, and DNS was managed using Route53. Millions of property photos were stored in S3 buckets and delivered through the CloudFront CDN. Email delivery was implemented using SES.
We were responsible for backups, security patches, and monitoring the entire infrastructure using Icinga and CloudWatch. Our operations team was available to all developers for questions and issues.