VELTRA Selects Cloudinary to Improve Its CX in Extraordinary Times

With Cloudinary, Japan’s leading online travel experience marketplace eliminated wasteful spend and greatly improved its digital image management

Cloudinary, the media experience platform for many of the world’s top consumer brands, announced that the highly popular Japanese-headquartered travel guide brand VELTRA is a new customer. VELTRA joins a growing list of travel and hospitality companies using Cloudinary for digital image management, including Trivago, HolidayCheck, Simplotel, Lastminute.com, Wynn, Hilton and Travelodge.

VELTRA has adopted the company’s advanced image optimization technology to enable it to react with maximum flexibility and greater efficiency to on-going COVID travel sector disruption. As a result, VELTRA–a play on the word TRAVEL–is now set up to deal with whatever the market demands from it in the next phase of post-Pandemic leisure experiences.

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“VELTRA is the go-to resource for more than 300,000 hopeful tourists and explorers,” explains its Vice President of Technology Service Planning and Technology, Naoyuki Matsuo. “But previous functionality for handling the vast amount of high-quality photos and videos provided by our subscribers and 4,000 partner tour operators had started to limit our agility. At the same time a fixed-cost model for supporting this vital resource was beginning to limit the company’s ability to flex to meet rapid market changes these past few Pandemic months.”

A search for a better way of delivering this key service led to a new direction–working with Cloudinary-delivered Content Delivery Network (CDN) and image optimization capability, delivered as a Cloudinary ‘Cloudfront AWS’ service from the Amazon cloud.

That means a much more responsive consumption model that stops the company having to pay for unused capacity in slower times, Matsuo states. “Unfortunately, COVID caused a sudden downturn in the travel industry, resulting in a significant decrease in our website traffic.

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“These circumstances tested whether we were able to meet our goal of ‘optimizing cost with regards to seasonal fluctuation’.” That goal has now been met, with an additional benefit: superior delivery of a key process, image handling. Specifically, VELTRA management values outsourcing this important feature of its web offering to a trusted third party, Matsuo adds.

“We have been using image optimization tools in order to deliver images efficiently,” he confirms. “But instead of having our web engineer make decisions concerning the resolution and quality of the video content users see, it is better to leave that up to an external service which specializes in displaying images at a reasonable size.”

Improvements in image display and response time

VELTRA’s new image management capability was built by key Cloudinary implementation partner and AWS expert Classmethod. By integrating Cloudinary with VELTRA’s Cloudfront CDN and Lamda@Edge to create a high fidelity scalable image management and delivery solution, the total amount of data transfer for page display has been reduced by 15% when compared with the previous service.

“We have also noticed improvements in image display and response time,” Matsuo commented. As a result, VELTRA engineers can keep adding new destinations and it can keep delivering on its core brand promise of changing customers’ lives “one visit at a time.”

Also, thanks to Cloudinary’s image optimization which requires only one basic image to automatically resize for display, Matsuo’s team no longer needs multiple versions of the same image in various sizes.

Next steps for Cloudinary at VELTRA will include use of the company’s content moderation function to offer more convenient services for travellers, such as blurring and other image processing, as well as functionality to help suggest keyword-on-photo-tags based tour plans.

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