swoodoo.com - leading flight and hotel search

Project objectives and challenges

swoodoo is one of the leading flight and hotel search websites in Germany. Our website and mobile apps enable the customer to easily compare hundreds of travel sites at once, in one comprehensive, fast and intuitive display. If a customer wants to spend hours searching every airline, hotel and other travel site yourself, that’s one option. If you’d prefer an easier way to find a good deal, we can help.

Once the customer finds what he wants, we give him choices where to book (most travel sites do not), including airline, hotel, car rental and online travel agency sites. We’ll send him right to the booking page to finish your purchase there.

swoodoo is completely free - we make money from advertising, so just like you can watch (most) TV shows for free, you can use swoodoo all you want, free (and no, we don’t add any fees).

For the development of our platform we do require qualified developers with specific knowledge in the areas of PHP, Java, mySQL, memcached, HTML5 and CSS.

Project flow

The idea behind swoodoo started in 2004 and has since then been further developed. swoodoo AG was formed in October 2006. The website swoodoo.com was launched in March 2007 and since then has quickly become Germany’s leading travel search engine.

With growing requirements and the complexity of the software solution swoodoo AG invested more to get highly skilled programmers. Technopark enabled flexible access to software development resources at a reasonable cost level.

Technopark recruited the team members in close co-operation with swoodoo and prepared the employment contracts. Furthermore, Technopark provided office, the IT and communication infrastructure. swoodoo managed and controlled the whole project development process by using eXtreme Programming (XP) and Test Driven Development.

Result

In May, 2010 KAYAK.COM the world’s leading travel search engine acquired swoodoo. The combined company will maintain both the KAYAK and swoodoo brands in Germany while integrating technology best practices. “On many metrics, swoodoo has been beating us handily in Germany,” said KAYAK Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Steve Hafner. “We're glad to now have their team on our side of the table. This acquisition gives us a clear leadership position in Europe’s second largest online travel market."

Lithuanian development team is now responsible for all of Europe, enabling us to support our rapid, fast growth in all other European countries.