Case StudiesThe Thinking Traveler: Faster Releases & Cost Savings
How a prestigious villa rental company got faster releases, lower costs, and a technical partner they could rely on
Together with Fibertide, The Thinking Traveller cut their deployment time 6x, avoided costly third-party tooling with purpose-built alternatives, and gave their engineering team the space to focus fully on product.
Collaboration Overview
The Client
The Thinking Traveller is an award-winning UK-based travel company offering curated villa holidays across the warm coasts of Europe. Behind the brand sits a portfolio of proprietary systems, a customer-facing booking portal, internal management tools, and a multi-platform web presence, all maintained by a compact engineering team.
Why did they need us?
As the company's digital ambitions grew and their technology expanded to multi-cloud, The Thinking Traveller’s CTO wanted to minimise operational risk and ensure that the engineers' attention was kept firmly on the business software rather than on DevOps or cloud infrastructure.
How did we help?
Fibertide embedded as the dedicated infrastructure and SRE team, taking full ownership of cloud operations, CI/CD, security hardening, and developer tooling. We brought the engineering practices of high-growth tech companies to a business where reliability directly impacts revenue.
This way, The Thinking Traveller's engineers could focus on building product features, while we ensured the platform was fast, secure, and ready to scale.
Client Insights
Location:
London, UK
Industry:
Luxury Travel & Hospitality
Company Type:
Established Business
Technology:
AWS, Azure, Cloudflare, Vercel, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET
"Fibertide's proactive approach keeps our operations running smoothly while consistently staying within budget. They take real ownership, regularly identifying security improvements and cost-saving opportunities without ever compromising on performance or service quality. My engineering team values their support tremendously."
Chris Scollo
CTO at The Thinking Traveller
The Challenge
Engineering scope expanding faster than tooling, with an impact on productivity
No dedicated DevOps or SRE resource in-house
Discrete systems running side-by-side across multiple cloud providers
Limited visibility into application performance and costs
A need for proactive security practices as the platform grows in complexity
Our Solution
Full ownership of cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare, managed through Infrastructure as Code
Redesigned CI/CD pipelines to dramatically accelerate deployments
Built bespoke, cost-efficient developer tooling replacing expensive third-party services
Continuous security hardening to stay ahead of emerging risks
Hands-on technical consulting embedded in the client's daily workflows
Results
Deployments run 6x faster
Custom observability tooling replacing services that would cost thousands per month, delivered at under $10/mo
Proactive approach to security and resilience, preventing issues before they arise
Engineering team free to focus entirely on product development
A trusted technical partner the entire team turns to for guidance
Project Highlights
Accelerating Engineer Velocity
Fibertide systematically reworked the CI/CD pipeline behind The Thinking Traveller's main application, cutting deployment times to a fraction of what they once were and enabling the engineering team to release with far greater frequency and confidence. The improvement was so notable that one of their senior engineers presented it at a Ruby community meetup in London.
Beyond deployments, we helped to rationalize and improve the team’s environment setup, giving engineers the confidence to iterate quickly without risk to production systems.
Cost-Efficient Custom Tooling
Rather than defaulting to expensive off-the-shelf solutions, we consistently engineered bespoke alternatives tailored to the client's actual needs. When frontend engineers needed detailed traffic analysis, we designed a custom logging pipeline delivering all necessary insights for under $10 per month, replacing a capability that would have cost $2,000–5,000 monthly through the existing vendor.
We applied the same principle across the board: reducing Vercel dependency through custom-managed CI, optimizing log storage to avoid billing tier increases, and building application performance dashboards that engineers across the team now rely on daily.
Reliability & Technical Partnership
What began as an infrastructure engagement has evolved into a broad technical partnership. Fibertide continuously hardens the platform's security posture, implements resilience measures against third-party outages, and ensures backup strategies are robust across cloud providers, preventing risks from materializing rather than reacting to them.
The Thinking Traveller's engineers, from backend developers to frontend specialists to product managers, now routinely consult Fibertide on topics well beyond cloud operations: from database backup strategies to tech cost forecasting.
This trust was earned through consistently delivering solutions that exceed expectations, communicating with precision and transparency, and treating the client's priorities as our own.
Key Outcomes
We modernized The Thinking Traveller's infrastructure, enabling faster delivery and lower operational costs.
Engineer Productivity
Deployment times cut by 6x and developer tooling streamlined, enabling the engineering team to ship features faster and with greater confidence.
Proactive Risk Mitigation
Continuous security hardening and resilience engineering, preventing risks from impacting the business as the platform grows.
Full Technical Partnership
From infrastructure to architecture to security consulting, Fibertide became the technical partner the entire technology organization turns to for guidance.
Significant Cost Savings
Custom-built solutions replaced expensive vendor services, delivering equivalent or superior capabilities at a fraction of the cost.
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