There has been a long running debate at Travel Republic as to whether we’re a tech company or a travel company. Travel Republic was born out of a software house. Fed up with writing software for companies that didn’t understand technology and driven by a desire to write some really great software, the developers started Travel Republic. Technology has been at the core of Travel Republic ever since. We think that makes us a Tech company, but we're sure the debate will continue.
All our own Work
We don’t outsource anything at Travel Republic. All the technology is ours; everything from the code that powers the web site, accounting systems, back office booking engines, analytics and our online marketing system. This gives us incredible flexibility and also some really exciting technical challenges. Our technology has enabled the business to grow rapidly over the past 6 years and we are going to keep it growing.
Every Second Counts
With millions of visitors and searches on our site, the code that runs it has to be excellent. We continually refactor and analyse our systems to make them faster and provide a richer experience for our customers. This on-going technical challenge is a fantastic opportunity to try out new techniques and really push the limits on what’s technically possible. But it’s not all about raw performance, our usability engineers know that every second of customer attention counts too. That’s why we’re always reinventing and tuning our site to achieve the best possible results.
What’s in the Stack?
We’re a “Microsoft Shop” at Travel Republic, with all our development being centred around the .Net Framework with a SQL server back end. There’s a variety of Microsoft technologies in the stack including LINQ, WCF and App Fabric. But we’re pragmatists here at Travel Republic too and could not be accused of slavishly following Microsoft. We pick and choose the best bits, and pass on the worst parts (who remembers Microsoft Atlas Ajax?!) and we're always on the lookout for third party development tools to help create even better software. Some great examples are nHibernate, Post Sharp and Mercurial which have all made a massive difference to the way we work.
Don’t Stand Still – You’ve got to be Agile
At Travel Republic, you never find the technology team standing still or sitting back thinking the job is done. There’s always new business and technical challenges that keep the most active minds busy. And we encourage our team to think ahead, to think of new ideas and most importantly let everyone know about them. That’s not to say we grasp at every new idea, but between us we like to explore, experiment and always keep moving forward. That’s why Agile is important for us. We release every week to our site and ideas can go from a thought you had on the bus on the way to work into production in a matter of days, not weeks.
If you like the sounds of what you’ve read here and want to learn more about technology at Travel Republic then check out our vacancies. We’re always on the lookout for exceptional IT professionals to join our team.