Flash Pack Implements their Data Pipeline in Days, not Months, with Estuary
Challenge
- Implement a modern data pipeline for all Flash Pack analytics needs, without the cost or complexity of most modern data pipelines, that will scale with the company’s hyper growth.
Solution
- Implemented a data pipeline that gathers hotel and other destination information from aggregators, sales, support, and ad info to support company-wide analytics in BigQuery.
Results
- Done in days, not months - the initial project went into production within two weeks using existing staff. The only reason it took this long was that Estuary added new connector support for Flashpack.
- Lowest costs - Flash Pack was able to implement, maintain, and add all the new functionality needed by the business using just one full-time data engineer for the first year. The alternatives would have cost more, required more engineers, and taken longer.
- Reliable - Estuary Flow has never gone down and always worked, even when the source systems failed.
About Flash Pack
Location
England
Industry
Travel
Goals
Build a pipeline with a small team and budget that will scale with the business
Flash Pack helps solo travelers to find the best group adventures, and make new friends along the way. Flash pack’s goal is to create one million meaningful friendships across the globe using the power of travel. With 80% of Flashpackers staying in touch after a trip, they are already well on their way to achieving it.
The Challenge
In order to create great traveler experiences and friendships, and to support the growth, Flash Pack needed great, scalable analytics. But they didn’t have the resources or the budget to manage the complex infrastructure that came with most data pipelines.
The Evaluation Process
Morgan Sadr-Hashemi, the CPTO of Flash Pack, evaluated several options. Airflow would have required development and resources that they did not have. Stitch would have been too complex for them to implement as well. While he considered Airbyte, there were some early concerns about support and key features.
The team chose Estuary for several reasons:
- Connector breadth - Estuary’s ability to support specific file formats from a hotel data aggregator, as well as its ability to deliver new connector functionality when needed.
- Support - Estuary’s support was high quality and very responsive. It gave Flash Pack confidence in Estuary in production.
- Skill sets - Estuary Flow supports Typescript and SQL. It allowed them to use existing Javascript skills to get started, and use SQL in the data team.
- ETL and ELT - Flash Pack wanted to use dbt for transforms inside BigQuery. Estuary’s native support for dbt allowed them to use Estuary for E(T)LT.
- Real-time and batch - Estuary allowed Flash Pack to combine real-time CDC from sources with batch loading BigQuery in 5 minute increments, and change latency or even move to real-time whenever they needed it, with a few clicks.
- Time to production - Even with the time it took for Estuary to add additional connector support, the initial project was done in a few weeks from evaluation to production.
The Solution
Using Estuary enabled the team to scale with Flash Pack’s growth in the first year with just one data engineer. Throughout the year, Estuary just worked. Even when the sources went down, Estuary never failed. This allowed the data engineer to add many new sources and analytics into BigQuery, their main data warehouse, including:
- Sales analytics - using connectors to Hubspot, Postgres, and other sales data sources.
- Support analytics - using Aircall and Intercom connectivity
- Ad analytics - using direct connectivity to Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, and other ad sources
We're a big fan of Estuary's real-time, no code model. It's magic that we're getting real time data without much effort and we don't have to spend time thinking about broken pipelines. We've also experienced fantastic support by Estuary.
Morgan Sadr-Hashemi, CPTO Flash Pack
Next Steps
Estuary enabled Flash Pack to support its rapid growth during that first year with just one data engineer. Since then, Flash Pack has been getting ready for the next phase of growth and expanding its team. The continued partnership with Estuary allows Flash Pack to focus on the business value of the data, and less on the infrastructure and data movement.