PinoyTravel treks toward success with Amazon Web Services

MANILA, Philippines - What company bases its entire business on the Cloud?

Award-winning Filipino start-up PinoyTravel (www.pinoytravel.com.ph) does, in its domestic bus travel reservation services on both the traditional web and mobile platforms. Their Cloud-based infrastructure is being sustained and powered by the industry-leading, start-up-friendly cloud computing services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“We have been a happy user of AWS Cloud services since we started,” said PinoyTravel founder and CEO Aurora Soriano. “We are confident that with AWS, we can achieve our business goals in a much shorter timeframe with great ease as compared to the traditional IT way of spending capital and time on hardware infrastructure.”

Soriano began the company in August last year but PinoyTravel was formally incorporated in October 2013. It was born out of Soriano’s incessant need for convenience in the large amount of traveling she did to domestic destinations while she was an officer of a leading telecommunications firm.

“Why do we need to still fall in line just to buy a bus ticket?” Soriano wondered. “I figured it was time to change it all.”  

She conceived the idea of having a centralized online booking and purchasing system for bus companies that would make lives easier for homebound provincial residents and travelers visiting popular tourist spots. Thus, PinoyTravel was established for users to get their bookings and ticket purchases with just a few taps on the mobile app or clicks on the website.

PinoyTravel became one of the first clients of Metro Pacific Group-backed startup incubator IdeaSpace, which has since provided the company with funding and business facilities. It has also received the award for “2013 IT Startup of the Year” from the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines.

Cloud computing provides that ideal environment for this fledgling yet helpful service for travelers going to such prized spots as Baler, Tuguegarao, Baguio, Manaoag, Dagupan, El Nido, Puerto Princesa, and the Bicol region (Albay, Sorsogon, Camarines Sur) by just using their PCs or Android devices. To offer such a convenient service, this IdeaSpace-incubated startup depends on the faultless performance of its infrastructure while keeping their overhead at the minimum, with the additional comfort of accessing the network or monitoring activity wherever they are or through any device — benefits they continue to enjoy as a user of AWS.

PinoyTravel is currently using Amazon EC2 virtual servers, Amazon S3 scalable storage, Amazon RDS relational database, and the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network to carry their entire 24/7 operations, set to ease the journeys of thousands of local travelers and foreign tourists.  “We were able to experiment with our ideas, iterate our prototype quickly and develop our solution within two months,” said Soriano.

“Unlike other IT companies we evaluated, AWS is the most startup-friendly in terms of price, functionality and support,” Soriano added.  “The AWS team knows what startups need, how to work with startups and are attentive in listening to us. We are happy with the robust performance and the flexibility that AWS provided for us to grow our business.” As such, PinoyTravel can subsist on less manpower and still retain enterprise-class performance, and is assured of scalability and support as they expand and grow as a company, yet provide an outstanding service that satisfies the extremely large market of provincial travelers and bus company partners that ply their routes.

PinoyTravel has nearly a thousand completed transactions (booking to purchased seats) and six major bus companies as partners — DLTBCo, Cherry, Five Star, Genesis, Joybus, and Victory Liner. Genesis and JoyBus, specifically have shifted the majority of their seat sales through PinoyTravel’s online service. The others are following the same track.  “We target servicing 200 routes this year by expanding our alliance with current partner bus companies and sealing agreements with new ones,” Soriano said. With its current lineup of routes, especially the Manila-Baler-Manila, Manila-Baguio-Manila, Puerto Princesa-El Nido-Puerto Princesa, and the new Bicol routes, and the high-traffic travel season of Holy Week upcoming, PinoyTravel surely has its hands full.