Travelstart

Goal

Travelstart is Africa’s leading online travel agency, offering flights, hotel bookings, car rentals, vacation packages, and other travel services through their online booking engine. In addition to their iOS and Android apps, they also wanted to offer a web platform to help hundreds of thousands of customers search, compare, and shop for travel bookings.

Like many travel companies, the pandemic gave Travelstart an opportunity to pause and reconsider their tech stack, which had become unwieldy with only 10 developers to support both platforms. The team decided it was time to rewrite their apps with a cross-platform solution, so they turned to Flutter.

Why Flutter?

Although they considered native frameworks like iOS, Kotlin, and Jetpack Compose, what they really wanted was a multi-platform solution that would give them a single codebase to manage. They were also attracted to Flutter’s flexibility and the potential to make their developer team more efficient.

Their solution

Travelstart migrated to Flutter and found that having a single codebase dramatically reduced their development and release time. Because they didn’t have to rewrite their code for new platforms, they used the Flutter web build feature to create a new web app, which powers their mobile website.

“Flutter radically changed the way we build apps. It is currently the best framework to use for cross-platform development.”

Results

Migrating to Flutter allows Travelstart to focus on features and product development instead of being bogged down with platform-specific issues. Their new codebase is 90% smaller than before, allowing them to reduce their mobile engineering team by 60%. Developer efficiency has skyrocketed, and the delivery pipeline is completely automated. New features take only days to develop and deliver, compared to the many weeks it would take previously.

Next up, Travelstart wants to use Flutter to create new apps for their customers in the travel industry, as well as a desktop app for their operations team.