Case Study: Widgety – content library for tourism, cruise and travel
Widgety is a huge content library that lets users manage the content, update it, and integrate the application into any site with no more than a couple of clicks.
Project details:
About the Client:
Widgety, a UK-based company in the travel and tourism industry, approached us with a comprehensive but poorly working content library for cruises and tourism. The solution was supposed to streamline content management for travel vendors by providing a single data point of cruise lines from operators. However, the system had performance and reliability issues and adding new features was a cumbersome task.
- Location: The UK
- Industry: Travel, Cruise and Tourism
- Team size: 3 members (1 Project Manager, 1 Senior RoR Developer, 1 Middle RoR Developer)
- Project duration: Ongoing 30 weeks
Business challenge
The business had two main challenges to overcome:
- to make it possible to gather data about various cruises, cruise ships, and tourist events in one place. The data had to be delivered via an API;
- to integrate and upgrade a special widget constructor which allows travel vendors to submit the info on cruises using a widget. This is a crucial feature for those who would like to integrate their website with Widgety service instead of building a custom one.
Additional requirements:
- optimize the system performance.
Our solution
To address the identified challenges and enhance Widgety’s capabilities, we introduced several key technological features:
- A widget constructor allowing vendors to submit cruise information quickly and efficiently.
- A REST API enabling developers to utilize Widgety’s data on third-party websites.
- Integration of additional data sources, enhancing the breadth and depth of information available. These innovations collectively optimized the system’s overall performance, ensuring stable and reliable operation.
We tried another company that one of our partners had used but they didn’t work out. I feel that SumatoSoft does a better investigation of what we’re asking for. They tell us how they plan to do a task and ask if that works for us. We chose them because their method worked with us.
Business value
Before:
- Travel vendors had no straightforward path to integrate dynamic cruise content into their websites, limiting their ability to offer up-to-date listings.
- Persistent performance issues and frequent reliability failures slowed the platform and blocked feature development.
- Data handling and privacy safeguards were inadequate, creating risk for vendor and traveler data.
- A poorly performing platform discouraged vendors and travel agents from integrating with Widgety’s content feeds.
After:
- The rebuilt widget constructor reduced cruise-content integration time by ~40%, enabling travel vendors to add live cruise listings without custom development work
- The overhauled platform architecture cut reliability incidents by ~35%, restoring stable operation and making new feature rollouts predictable.
- Strengthened security architecture meets current data privacy standards, giving vendors and travelers confidence in the platform’s data handling.
- ~30% more travel vendors and agents joined the platform following the rebuild, growing the network of cruise content served to booking websites.
