Cheekytrip: Migrating and Modernizing a Travel Platform on AWS

Overview

Cheekytrip is a leading UK based online travel comparison site that provides consumers with a comprehensive search platform for finding and comparing thousands of holiday deals from across the globe. Operating in a highly competitive market, the company relies on its platform to deliver real-time search results and a seamless experience to high volumes of users daily. To ensure long-term stability and improve operational efficiency, Cheekytrip partnered with Lambert Labs to migrate their core travel platform from a legacy private cloud environment to AWS via a strategic lift-and-shift and modernization of their infrastructure, centered on Amazon EC2 for web application hosting and Amazon RDS for managed database performance.

Lambert Labs delivered a
seamless transition for our migration to AWS
Steve Campion, Managing Director, Cheekytrip

Opportunity / Customer Challenge

As an established player in the online travel industry, Cheekytrip managed its platform using a legacy private cloud environment. This infrastructure presented operational risks, as the company faced the challenge of self-managing a monolithic architecture while ensuring the high availability required for a 24/7 search engine. The lack of elasticity in their private cloud setup meant that handling seasonal traffic surges—common in the travel sector—required manual intervention and lacked the dynamic scalability needed to optimize performance during peak booking periods.

The primary challenge was to transition away from this restrictive private cloud footprint without disrupting the critical real-time search and booking services their customers rely on, and without increasing infrastructure costs. Cheekytrip needed a solution that would provide a more elastic, resilient and secure environment, and offer a clear path for future modernization. The opportunity lay in migrating to AWS to achieve enterprise-grade reliability, ensuring that their travel platform could scale effortlessly to meet global demand while improving the overall speed and consistency of the user experience.

Solution

To address the requirement for a stable, cost-effective transition to the cloud, Lambert Labs implemented a strategy for a “lift-and-shift” migration to AWS. This approach focused on replicating the core travel platform’s functionality while leveraging managed cloud services to improve reliability without the added complexity and cost of a full re-architecture. The production environment was built around a high performance EC2 instance, which hosts the web and admin applications, providing a direct and stable replacement for their legacy private cloud servers.

For the data layer, the platform’s database was migrated to RDS, providing Cheekytrip with a robust, managed environment for their critical holiday and search data. By moving to RDS, the company benefits from automated backups and simplified maintenance, significantly reducing the manual burden of database administration that existed in their previous setup. This ensures that the platform’s high traffic search queries are handled with consistent performance and minimal downtime. By prioritizing these core services, the final architecture achieves the customer’s goal of enterprise-grade reliability and security while strictly adhering to their requirements for cost control and operational simplicity.

Migrating our core travel platform to AWS was a critical step in ensuring the long-term stability of our business. Lambert Labs helped deliver a seamless transition that eliminated our single points of failure while reducing our infrastructure costs. We now have a more resilient environment that allows us to focus on our customers rather than infrastructure. (Steve Campion, Managing Director, Cheekytrip)

Outcome

The migration of Cheekytrip to AWS has successfully delivered a stable, modern foundation for their travel platform, eliminating the operational risks associated with their legacy private cloud. By transitioning to EC2 and RDS, the company has achieved the enterprise-grade reliability they required. This strategic “lift-and-shift” has significantly reduced the administrative burden on their technical team, as managed services now handle critical tasks like database backups.

One of the most significant results of the project was the seamless nature of the transition; the platform was migrated with minimal disruption, ensuring that customers could continue searching for holidays throughout the process. The new environment provides a level of consistency and performance that was difficult to maintain in the private cloud, giving Cheekytrip the confidence that their platform can reliably handle high traffic volumes.

Ultimately, this migration has future-proofed the business. While the current architecture prioritizes cost-efficiency and simplicity, being on AWS means that Cheekytrip now has the flexibility to scale or adopt more advanced cloud features whenever their business needs evolve. They have successfully moved from a private cloud environment to a secure and resilient cloud-native home.

This project demonstrates how a targeted AWS migration can improve elasticity and reliability while maintaining strict cost control. By helping move the platform to Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, we provided Cheekytrip with a high availability foundation and significantly reduced their operational burden, proving that enterprise-grade stability can be achieved without complex or costly re-architecture. (George Lambert, Founder & CEO, Lambert Labs)

About Cheekytrip

Cheekytrip is a leading UK-based online travel search and comparison platform that helps consumers find and book the best value holidays globally. By aggregating thousands of deals from a wide range of travel providers, the company offers a comprehensive one-stop shop for everything from all-inclusive beach breaks to city getaways. With a focus on providing high quality search results and a seamless experience, Cheekytrip has established itself as a trusted partner for holidaymakers looking for convenience and value in a highly competitive market.