Two seconds in the space-time continuum does not seem long. But as with most things in life, everything is relative.

Most of us would happily spend minutes talking to a friend or hours watching a much-awaited movie, but in online travel search, if we are looking for flight options and that screen takes more than a couple of seconds to load…boy, do we get restless.

NB: This is a viewpoint from Rashesh Jethi, SVP engineering and head of R&D, Amadeus North America and Latin America.

The diminishing attention span of consumers is no secret, and travel companies are joining the list of online retailers who have to provide instant shopping results or risk losing their interest, mindshare – and wallet share.

Research shows that while searching for travel options, if the results don’t come back fast enough we are likely to abandon that search and move on to something else.

From inspiration, to search and booking, to boarding, travel technology is complex but none of that matters to a traveler when they start their search for a flight or hotel room for their next vacation.

In fact by industry estimates, 25% of travelers haven’t even decided on a destination or date when they start researching their travel options. Each booking scenario typically has millions of possible combinations that change dynamically every second.

But, when we are ready to shop, we just want to know our choices – and we want to know them NOW.

To provide some context around the complexity that the travel industry handles, consider that at Amadeus we process two to four million bookings on any given day.

While this scale itself is significant, these millions of transactions come after billions of searches for that perfect flight or hotel room.

For air travel search alone, the math problem is quite daunting: approximately 600 airlines operate more than 60,000 daily flights in 190+ countries, resulting in millions of flight options that need to be made available on a daily basis.

And when you add preferences like cabin choice, fare type, travel dates, length of stay, number of stops, connection times, preferred airports and more, the possible combinations go into the billions.

What keeps the head of an online travel company up at night is having the right technology to sort through this staggering amount of data to produce the exact set of options for every unique search criteria and have it scale to accommodate the exponentially increasing volume of transactions every day.

But perhaps most importantly, all of this has to happen in split-second response times that consumers expect and demand from their travel partners.

Standard relational databases are simply not designed to cope with the scale and speed challenges that face such modern-day travel industry applications. To deliver accurate and sub-second response times required, a completely new approach is needed to traditional travel search and shopping systems.

That is why in development of our Amadeus Instant Search application, we partnered with MongoDB, a globally recognized database provider.

Instant Search gives leading online travel companies, such as Kayak, the ability to search through the billions of combinations in real-time and narrow down the exact set of results that meet a traveler’s preferences in milliseconds.

The results are higher customer satisfaction and better conversion rates – the coveted goals for any online business.

MongoDB delivered the ability to scale the technology’s data volumes while supporting real-time processing of complex algorithmic modeling involving travel parameters like date, destinations, connection times and temperature.

This means that travelers get exactly what they want, when they need it, and provides us and others with the flexibility and operational scale to respond to the increasing demands of travel companies.

No one can accurately predict the future, but by pursuing constant innovation, online travel companies are best positioned to respond to changing traveler and industry dynamics.

Sub-second response times, accurate availability, reliable fares, and the power to personalize search – all offer a great value to today’s traveler.

“Give the people what they want”, goes the popular song. Perhaps those lyrics should be amended with “and give it to them right now” because, if you make your customers wait, an extra millisecond might be all it takes to lose them.

NB: This is a viewpoint from Rashesh Jethi, SVP engineering and head of R&D, Amadeus North America and Latin America.

NB2: Time image via Pixabay.