← All case studies
Case study · Travel

A global OTA prevents revenue leakage with a real-time supplier circuit breaker.

With Bicycle, a global online travel agency tracks flight bookability supplier by supplier and routes traffic to healthier suppliers the moment performance drops, before bookings fail.

Industry TravelRegion GlobalLive in weeks

A global online travel agency for flights, hotels, and packages.

This global online travel agency offers flights, hotels, and vacation packages across web and mobile. It processes millions of flight searches daily and delivers dynamic pricing so customers see competitive fares. Operating in 200+ countries with partnerships across hundreds of airlines and thousands of hotels, it invests heavily in mobile to capture spontaneous and last-minute bookings.
01The challenge

When a supplier degrades, bookings fail fast.

This OTA books high volumes of flights through multiple suppliers for the same airline inventory, so supplier reliability directly shapes revenue and customer experience. When a supplier times out, returns error codes, or shows inventory that cannot confirm, bookings break at search, pricing, or payment, and the cost mounts by the hour. Legacy monitoring and manual workflows were too slow and fragmented to catch the pattern and reroute traffic in time.

01

Technical timeouts and provider errors

Supplier-side timeouts and error codes caused failed booking attempts, most painfully during peak demand windows when volume was highest.

02

Inventory that fails at confirmation

Flights surfaced as bookable but fell through at confirmation, frustrating customers at the final step of checkout.

03

Broken flows on mobile

Authentication and integration issues interrupted booking flows, with mobile channels hit hardest.

04

Manual monitoring and switching

Detecting a degraded supplier and switching to a healthier one by hand left long gaps between onset, detection, and action.

02What Bicycle did

A circuit breaker that acts before revenue leaks.

The OTA deployed Bicycle to replace manual checks with an autonomous supplier circuit breaker that continuously tracks bookability and takes action the moment supplier performance drops, without disrupting existing booking systems.

01

Granular bookability monitoring

Booking success and failure rates tracked at the supplier, carrier, and pseudo-city level, recalculated every ten minutes so degradation surfaces early.

02

Tier-based thresholds

Bookability targets modeled from historical performance, held near 90 percent for top carriers and lower for smaller-volume carriers, so alerts reflect what normal looks like for each segment.

03

Unified data ingestion

Streaming booking events, provider error types and codes, revenue signals, and geographic context combined into a single analytics layer.

04

Automated supplier circuit breaker

The moment a threshold is breached, a webhook call temporarily removes the underperforming supplier from the routing workflow and shifts traffic to healthier suppliers.

05

Contextual Slack alerts

Flights commercial and operations teams get alerts with the affected carrier, route, and provider error category, while the backend has already rerouted traffic. Repeat customer retries are filtered out so metrics reflect true unique attempts.

Supplier firefighting, turned into an autonomous safety net.

The OTA quietly protects flight revenue and customer trust, incident by incident.

03What changed

Incidents became controlled events, not crises.

Revenue leakage contained

Supplier-side degradation is caught and rerouted quickly, limiting the duration and impact of failures that previously drained revenue by the hour.

Bookability protected

Top-tier carriers stay bookable as traffic shifts to healthier suppliers the moment an issue appears, keeping the search-to-confirmation journey smooth during peaks.

Commercial teams act directly

Rich, contextual alerts let commercial and operations teams respond without waiting on data and engineering, freeing those teams for higher-value work.

One live view of supplier health

Consistent, granular performance at supplier, carrier, and pseudo-city level replaces stitched-together tools and spreadsheets, improving supplier accountability.

See Bicycle on your supplier data.

Bring one revenue-critical KPI. We'll show how Bicycle detects the movement, explains the cause, and recommends the next step.