Klook Case Study

About Klook:

Klook, a world-leading travel activities and services booking platform, empowers travelers to discover and book on-demand local attractions, tours, transportation, food and exclusive experiences in more than 350 destinations around the world. More than 30 million people in over 180 markets use Klook’s website and award-winning app every month. Klook platforms support 41 currencies, 14 languages and 100,000+ offerings. Founded in 2014 with a mission to help fellow globetrotters “Keep Looking” for amazing experiences, Klook now has more than 26 offices worldwide with two tech hubs in Shenzhen, China, and Singapore.

The Challenge:

The in-destination travel industry has largely consisted of small local operators using pen and paper booking systems and word-of-mouth marketing. Klook has established online booking and redemption solutions for tens of thousands of travel operators around the world, which helps digital-first travelers discover and book the best things to do on the go. To serve this new and constantly changing sector of the travel industry, Klook needs agile, cloud-based tech solutions that can scale quickly to keep pace with the company’s rapid growth. Given the volume of offers on its platform, Klook needed a highly reliable and durable cloud platform, with elasticity and flexibility. With travelers booking experiences on-the-go, Klook’s system has to navigate complex mobile security and compliance inquiries from multiple countries and continents. Parallel IT inquiries inside Klook have grown quickly, and Klook’s mobile- transaction-heavy business requires powerful, reliable servers and secure data storage with a durable, time-efficient infrastructure that’s fast and easy for Kook’s IT team.

Why Amazon Web Services:

“We started Klook with a vision to be the global leader in travel experiences, and we have always kept our technology solutions as streamlined as possible,” said Bernie Xiong, CTO and Co-Founder of Klook. “We chose Amazon Web Services – and continue to grow with AWS – because they are fast to implement, easy to manage, cost-effective, have robust security features and can scale rapidly.”

AWS has supported Klook from day one, empowering the business with a program package to manage services and a detail-driven architecture that has evolved over time. At first, VPC, EC2 and RDS hosted Klook’s web and mobile app.

Today, Klook leverages three AWS database services. Aurora databases handle Klook’s service order system and user management system, delivering highly automated daily management and top-notch parallel reading and writing. DynamoDB, a noSQL database, provides a key-value store for the personalization engine that delivers customized recommendations of places and experiences based on previous site activity instantly.

Additionally, Klook has also adapted the AWS approach to DevOps and software development, authorizing each team to move fast and release new ideas. ECS and Fargate automatically balance team docker resources, providing easy scalability. As a result, Klook has a highly secure platform that off-loads a majority of its security defense and compliance certification.

The Benefits

Klook has nimbly leapt ahead of older travel sites to become the world’s most-searched travel activities and services company on Google since late 2018. As the company has expanded its client services and global user base, it has also grown its tech stack. Thanks to AWS, Klook has hundreds of microservices efficiently running in production, with very few operation engineers.

As of April 2019, Klook has raised more than $520 Million from leading venture capital firms including the SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital, TCV, Matrix Partners, Goldman Sachs and others, to further accelerate its global expansion. Klook continues to grow its services and inventory – and AWS keeps pace – as the company expands into new geographies and travel verticals.

“Ambitious startups can dream big and move fast by using Amazon Web Services,” said Xiong. “Because our backend infrastructure is strong, scalable and easy to manage, we are able to focus on what Klook does best – connecting travelers with the best destinations and experiences around the world.