Blue Bay Travel's Growth on DigitalOcean for 10+ Years

Blue Bay Travel is an Online Travel Agency and Tour Operator based out of the UK—initially specializing in Caribbean holidays, they now also offer holiday packages in Europe and the Indian Ocean. Blue Bay Travel moved to DigitalOcean from on-premises servers ten years ago and has relied on DigitalOcean’s variety of cloud products to support their growth, as their own team and range of offers have expanded over time.

Building a tech-enabled travel business

Blue Bay Travel has been in business for 21 years, first starting out as a travel agency specializing in Caribbean holidays. The company has been at the forefront of the move to online travel planning, offering all their services through their website or call-center, rather than having a traditional walk in travel office. Over the years, Blue Bay Travel has increased the destinations they serve to Europe and the Indian Ocean, and also grown their team to over 140 employees and 60 self-employed, home based agents, with eight team members focused on the tech side of the business.

Initially hosted on internal servers, the team recognized the benefits of moving their infrastructure to the cloud in 2014, and found DigitalOcean, which itself was a relatively new company at the time. They saw that DigitalOcean was cooperating with new technology communities like Laravel and decided to try it out.

Blue Bay Travel’s main priority was saving time for the tech team, with Software Development Manager Alex Bowers saying “At the time when we started with DigitalOcean, we were a very small tech team of just three. We wanted a service that could save us time so that we could better use that time elsewhere. And then the business began to grow very quickly, which is why optimizing the resource was so important. The fact that everything seemed so simple and the support was there immediately was crucial for us.”

Additionally, the transparent monthly costs on DigitalOcean helped Blue Bay Travel know what they would be spending each month—as Alex said “Knowing the monthly costs and that we could guarantee what we were going to spend each month really helped the business, because we could estimate what the costs would be over a 12-month period.”

Leveraging multiple DigitalOcean products for success

Blue Bay Travel now hosts all of their systems on DigitalOcean, including their customer-facing websites and the in-house applications that power their travel booking services. They utilize Droplets, Managed Redis, and Volumes, and have also recently started using DigitalOcean Functions as an alternative to scaling vertically or horizontally.

Speaking of Managed Databases, Alex mentioned how using a managed database versus their previously self-managed databases has saved the team time and allowed them to focus more on building their product rather than database management. “By using managed databases we could instead use the funds to hire more software-based devs to build additional products, instead of additional database engineers.”

They also use backups through Snapshooter, which has saved them from the pain of losing their work, with Alex saying “Snapshots are something we really couldn’t live without anymore. The fact that we can recover Droplets quickly is amazing. Their flexibility also allows us to create the correct backup schedule for each application”.

As Blue Bay Travel continues to expand, they look forward to their continued partnership with DigitalOcean to save them time, keep costs in check, and continue delivering new features and products they can integrate into their growing architecture.