H10 Hotels delivers a superb ecommerce experience with Fastly and reduces origin traffic by more than 50%

The challenge

With a passion for thoughtful details, H10 Hotels runs 70 outstanding hotels in 25 destinations. The ecommerce service team at H10 aims to bring the same attention to detail to the online customer experience. Speed, resilience, and security contribute to the best online services. H10hotels.com needs to ensure its ecommerce infrastructure is safe and secure, as well as fast and resilient. Concurrence and scalability made delivering the top level of service challenging during peak seasons, such as Black Friday, explains Lluís Espigares, ecommerce service manager at H10 Hotels.

Espigares’s team wanted to find an ecommerce security provider to help identify and mitigate common eCommerce challenges and ensure the site’s speed and resilience. They sought a helpful advisor and provider of security tools and services, such as a web application firewall (WAF) and bot management. The provider would also need a global network to extend the market reach of H10 Hotels, a capability not available from the previous provider.

"We chose Fastly because we needed a provider that offered global coverage. Fastly provided the speed and resilience we were looking for as well as an easy-to-use platform,” he says.

Beyond the technology, Fastly stood out for human factors—its developer-focused platform, security advisors, and its caring culture. “Trust was vital for us. Fastly’s team has earned our trust by being highly supportive throughout the migration process and in the years since then," he explains.

The solution

H10 Hotels executes its global strategy with the help of Fastly’s exceptional Varnish technology and feature set.

Migrates easily with developer-friendly support

Espigares explains that transitioning to Fastly was smooth and frictionless with Fastly’s fast, efficient support team. “Fastly Professional Services made it a straightforward process. They took the files from our previous provider and helped us build the services we needed. Over the years, Fastly has continued to help us fine-tune our configurations," Espigares says.

Fastly’s developer-friendly approach makes integration seamless for hospitality companies like H10 Hotels. “Since Fastly’s platform is designed for developers, it fits naturally into our workflow and doesn’t feel alien to our team. And Varnish (VCL) makes it easy to integrate Fastly with our other solutions,” he says.

Espigares adds that Fastly Professional Services even helped fix integration issues in another provider’s solution. The integration ensures the resilience of content related to H10 Hotel pricing and availability content, which cannot be cached. “Culturally and technically, Fastly’s support and guidance helped us achieve what we wanted.”

Ensure quality service

Espigares recalled how heavy spikes in traffic during major sales events nearly brought his ecommerce platform to a halt. “Now, Fastly provides the infrastructure to pave the way to a great customer experience,” he says.

Cuts traffic to the origin server by more than half

With Visibility enabled by Fastly, H10 Hotels ecommerce team is both more agile and more effective strategically. “On the backend, Fastly gives us better insight into metrics, enabling us to make changes in real time and see an immediate positive impact on our services. And visibility into requests that reach the origin allows us to see how to build strategies to manage backend requests,” Espigares says.

As a result, ecommerce team has lowered traffic by more than 50% to the origin server for the small amount of content that is uncacheable saving them egress costs

Receives more conversions with quicker load times and responses

H10hotels.com is faster with Fastly and delivers more conversions. "The positive impact Fastly has on our customer experience is incredible. Response times improved significantly. And quicker load times contributed to higher conversion rates—an essential factor for business success in hospitality," Espigares says.

Key takeaway

Espigares recommends Fastly to colleagues in the hospitality industry. “Fastly offers excellent out-of-the-box solutions that provide fast responses with low effort for us. And the combination of state-of-the-art technology and exceptional human factor makes their product brilliant. With Fastly, we get a partner we can rely on."