VELTRA Cuts Costs and Improves Its Visual Experience With Cloudinary

VELTRA, a play on the word “travel,” is Japan’s leading online travel experience marketplace. The brand adopted Cloudinary’s advanced image optimization technology delivered as an Amazon CloudFront service from the Amazon cloud to enable maximum flexibility and greater efficiency, initially to weather the travel sector disruption due to COVID.

ABOUT

VELTRA

VELTRA specializes in the sales of local tours worldwide. It offers approximately 27,000 local tours and activities in over 150 destinations, while maintaining partnerships with 4,000 travel organizing companies internationally. More than just a travel itinerary marketplace, VELTRA highlights travel plans offered by travel organizers to heighten their appeal to tourists around the world, while simultaneously providing customers with support to help them feel at ease with their tour choices.

THE CHALLENGE

Optimizing Cost Expenditure When Web Traffic Drops

As a marketplace dedicated to tours and activities, attractive images of the travel destinations is a key factor for VELTRA as it translates directly to the users’ likelihood of signing-up with its services. At the same time, when users search for tours and activities on the website, the pages need to be highly responsive so that users don’t leave the site.

“VELTRA is the go-to resource for more than 300,000 hopeful tourists and explorers,” explains Naoyuki Matsuo, Vice President of Technology Service Planning and Technology at VELTRA. “Previous functionality for handling the vast amount of high-quality photos and videos provided by our subscribers and 4,000 partner tour operators had started to limit our agility. At the same time, a fixed-cost model for supporting this vital resource was beginning to limit our ability to flex to meet rapid market changes during the first pandemic months.”

In the past, VELTRA developed and used an in-house image optimization tool, but then switched to an image optimization tool offered as an additional service by their content delivery network (CDN) service company. However, due to the contractual arrangement of this service, peak usage was reflected in higher fixed monthly fees. The fixed monthly fees increased as the number of visitors and processes to the web service grew. The management team was faced with the challenge of finding a way to reduce costs, as the monthly fee during the off-season ended up being the same as for the peak season.

While researching new services to meet not only functional specifications but also cost-saving requirements, VELTRA came across Cloudinary’s CDN and image optimization capabilities, delivered as a Cloudinary “Cloudfront AWS” service from the Amazon cloud.

“Cloudinary also has a fixed monthly fee, but with Amazon CloudFront, the CDN is fully charged on a pay-as-you-go basis, which we can benefit from because it reduces the cost when there is less traffic on the website,” explains Matsuo. “We found this service to be a good fit in terms of cost as well as regarding its image management functions.”

Cloudinary seemed to be the perfect solution for VELTRA as it met its specifications and had additional value-added features. Cloudinary also only required few internal resources, allowing the manager in charge to handle the project by themselves.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

Unleashing the Potential of the Cloud

For the implementation, VELTRA turned to Cloudinary partner and AWS reseller Classmethod. There was no need to make any major changes to the existing environment to get the system up and running quickly. VELTRA could use the same content resources stored in its existing AWS environment. It replaced its old CDN with CloudFront, using Cloudinary for image optimization. Also, as an AWS Partner Network solution, Cloudinary can be rapidly deployed in the Amazon cloud.

THE RESULTS

Optimizing Costs While Improving Image Display and Response Times

By using Cloudinary with Amazon CloudFront and Lambda @ Edge, VELTRA gains a more responsive consumption model that stops the company having to pay for unused capacity in times with less web traffic. “These circumstances tested whether we were able to meet our goal of ‘optimizing cost with regards to seasonal fluctuation.’” That goal has been met, with an additional benefit: superior delivery of a key process in image handling.

Specifically, VELTRA management values outsourcing this important feature of its web offering to a trusted third party. “We had been using image optimization tools in order to deliver images efficiently,” Matsuo confirms. “But instead of having our web engineer make decisions concerning the resolution and quality of the video content users see, it is better to leave that up to an external service which specializes in displaying images at a reasonable size.”

“We have also noticed improvements in image display and response time,” Matsuo comments. As a result, VELTRA engineers can keep adding new destinations and it can keep delivering on its core brand promise of changing customers’ lives ‘one visit at a time.’”

Next steps for Cloudinary at VELTRA will include use of the company’s content moderation function to offer more convenient services for travelers, such as blurring and other image processing, as well as functionality to help suggest keyword-on-photo-tags based tour plans.