Building a Scalable Travel Booking Platform for Nepal’s First Public Travel Company
How I led a team to build a high-performing travel booking platform for Guru Travels Limited using Django, CI/CD pipelines, and DevOps practices.
Client: Guru Travels Limited
Industry: Travel & Tourism
🚧 The Challenge
In Nepal’s rapidly evolving digital space, there was no centralized online travel portal offering comprehensive services such as flight bookings, hotel reservations, cab services, and holiday packages—all in one platform. Guru Travels Limited set out to be a first mover in this space, and I was brought in to help make that vision a reality.
👨💻 My Role
As a Technical Team Lead at Aspark Systems, I co-led a team of 8 developers (frontend and backend), coordinated directly with stakeholders, and owned the DevOps lifecycle. My responsibilities spanned across:
- System architecture planning and infrastructure provisioning
- Deployment and CI/CD automation
- API performance tuning and database optimization
- GDS integration and backend logic in Django
- Oversight on security configurations for on-prem servers
🔧 Tech Stack & Implementation
We chose Python and Django Framework for the backend due to their scalability and robustness. For mobile application, we used Flutter to ensure cross-platform support covering both Android and iOS users. The DevOps pipeline was built with GitHub Actions, which facilitated seamless CI/CD to on-premises infrastructure.
A significant portion of our engineering effort was spent integrating multiple Global Distribution Systems (GDS), ensuring real-time access to flight, hotel, and travel package data.
Key DevOps Practices:
- Automated CI/CD with GitHub Actions
- Security-hardened on-prem server deployment
- Monitoring via custom dashboards and logs
Performance Optimization:
One of our key challenges was reducing API latency. I performed extensive profiling and discovered that unindexed database queries were the primary bottleneck. After optimizing joins and adding indexes, we slashed response times from 8.5 seconds to under 300ms.
📈 Business Impact
Our collaborative efforts led to the successful launch of Nepal’s first public travel booking platform. The portal quickly gained market traction:
- ✅ 200% increase in traffic and bookings within 3 months
- ✅ 50% reduction in average booking time
- ✅ Improved user retention and satisfaction metrics
Guru Travels Limited was not only able to fill a crucial market gap but also gained a strong digital foothold in Nepal’s travel industry.
🧠 Lessons Learned
Through this project, I gained:
- Deeper insight into multi-GDS system integration
- Practical experience in project leadership and stakeholder communication
- Enhanced skillsets in CI/CD workflows and cloud security practices
If I were to revisit this project, I would prioritize UX design more from day one, which would have further elevated user satisfaction. Debugging GDS integration was another major hurdle that required extensive trial, testing, and validation.