Stray's existing website had become difficult to maintain and the booking journey relied heavily on external systems. The new platform needed to improve performance, simplify content management and create a smoother path from discovering a tour through to booking and payment. Scalability was also important, particularly during campaigns and periods of high booking activity.
We built the website with Next.js on the frontend and Sanity as the headless CMS, giving their team much more flexibility to manage tours, destinations, campaigns and other content.
Behind the website sits a dedicated middleware layer that connects the customer experience with their booking systems and Flywire payments.
One of the most interesting parts of the project was controlling the volume of requests reaching their underlying booking APIs.
Rather than sending every request directly through, we built a controlled API funnel and queue that manages how traffic reaches the booking platform. This helps keep requests within API throttle limits, protects their underlying systems during traffic spikes and keeps the customer experience responsive.
It's the kind of engineering customers will hopefully never notice, and that's exactly the point.
Stray now has a modern digital platform designed around content, performance and conversion, with an architecture that can continue to evolve as their booking journeys, campaigns and integrations grow.
