The travel and tourist industry has bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, with the World Tourism Barometer by UN Tourism showing that international traveling recovered by 99%.
Last year, an estimated 1.4 billion international tourists (overnight visitors) were recorded around the world, an increase of 11% over 2023. As more people look to travel, and with many of them researching and booking travel online, travel ecommerce sites have also seen a boom, with the online travel market estimated to be worth $600 billion.
As more people turn to these sites, there has also been an increasing demand to effectively store and sort the data collected in order to provide better services. It is not just the amount of data that has increased; the type of data that can be collected has also changed, with unstructured data accounting for approximately 80% of all data. This has led travel eCommerce sites to invest in data management systems that handle huge amounts of data and can organize the various data types. One database that is proving to be increasingly useful is the document database.
What is a Document Database?
A document database is a type of NoSQL database that stores information on documents instead of storing data in fixed rows and columns. The information is stored in documents as field-value pairs and can be of any type or structure, including strings, numbers, dates, arrays, or objects. This makes them very flexible as they can easily be mapped to objects in most programming languages, allowing developers to develop their applications rapidly. A guide to MongoDB’s document databases outlines the four key features of the document database: the document model, the flexible schema, how they can be distributed and resilient, and the ability to query through an API or query language. Below, we will detail how document databases can help travel eCommerce sites.
Documents Can Store Large Amounts of Data
Document databases allow for a vast amount of data to be easily stored and organized as the documents can store information about one object and any related metadata. Travel eCommerce sites collect a wide range of data, including booking information, travel searches and history, personal information, customer feedback, social media interactions, and much more. The flexible schema of the document model allows travel eCommerce sites to easily store a wide array of information for a single customer in one accessible document. Using the document database, travel eCommerce sites can easily collate the data and look for patterns, which in turn can help with marketing strategies. As we noted in our November 2024 post on marketing mishaps that could seriously harm your eCommerce business, brands need to resonate with their consumers in order to be competitive. The document model allows travel eCommerce sites to target their campaigns at both a personalized and collective level.
Highly Scalable to Keep Up With Online Travel Demand
As mentioned in the introduction, the travel industry is back to pre-pandemic levels, and the large volumes of people using online eCommerce stores to book travel have increased the amount of data that can be stored. A LinkedIn feature on databases for eCommerce highlighted how the eCommerce industry is constantly evolving and growing. In order to keep up with this demand, travel eCommerce sites need to employ a database that can easily scale as their consumer base increases. Document databases scale horizontally compared to traditional databases that scale vertically. This means that a document database can seamlessly expand by adding nodes to the existing servers rather than adding additional hardware to increase storage space. The ability to scale horizontally allows travel eCommerce stores to be much more agile in expanding their operations.
Mobile Application Capabilities
In order to be competitive, travel eCommerce sites must be available across different platforms. Today, more and more travelers book their travels through travel apps on mobile devices, with the total global revenue exceeding $1.2 billion in 2023. The dynamic data structures of the document database mean that it can keep up with evolving mobile app data models where schema can quickly change. NoSQL databases also provide the low-latency data retrieval that is necessary for real-time interactions, ensuring that the travel eCommerce site app runs seamlessly despite the large amount of data it collects.
As the travel eCommerce industry continues to expand at a rapid rate, more sites will turn to databases that can handle the demands of running such a site. The flexible schema of document databases, alongside their ability to scale and work on mobile applications, make them ideal for travel eCommerce sites. If you are looking for more marketing information, read our article on Essential Digital Marketing Tips.
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