Context & Drivers

Business context

The Deals experience needed to help customers search a large and varied travel catalogue using combinations of operator, destination, departure point, duration, date, price and other travel attributes.

The existing model had evolved around browser-side retrieval, filtering and rendering. That made the frontend responsible for concerns that extended beyond presentation.

Stakeholders and concerns

Customers needed responsive filtering and predictable search behaviour.

Marketing and digital teams needed to retain control of the Webflow experience.

Frontend development needed a stable result contract rather than direct dependence on source-system structures.

Integration and platform teams needed a maintainable indexing flow, clear credential boundaries and an operable search service.

Scope and boundaries

In scope:

• catalogue search and faceting;
• indexed travel-product representation;
• Webflow integration;
• public search access;
• privileged index administration;
• migration from legacy search/data-delivery scripts.

Out of scope:

• replacing the upstream product systems;
• replacing Webflow as the presentation platform;
• moving booking responsibility into the search service.

Drivers and constraints

The main architectural forces were:

• catalogue scale;
• faceted search performance;
• maintainability;
• Webflow compatibility;
• security of administrative credentials;
• reproducible index state;
• clear separation of presentation, search and source-data concerns.

These drivers led to a design in which search became an explicit platform capability rather than another browser-side feature.