Booking.com CTO Rob Francis on a greenfield rebuild at the digital travel giant

Back in 1996 when the Internet was still young, and users had to listen to the frequency shift key chirruping of modems singing to each other to access it, a Dutchman named Geert-Jan Bruinsma came across Hilton.com, which let you book hotel rooms online in the US, and decided to do something similar in the Netherlands; spinning up Bookings.nl to let hotels advertise vacant rooms in exchange for handing over a 5% commission.

The story had some twists and turns, but a few hard facts speak to how it turned out. Booking.com is big: record $27 billion in gross bookings in the first quarter of 2022 big; the highest quarterly figure in the company’s history. As part of Booking Holdings – listed as BKNG on the NASDAQ since 1999 and generating revenues of $11 billion last year, Booking.com is now available in 43 languages and offers over 28 million listings. Indeed, BKNG’s travel bookings of $76.6 billion in 2021 make it one of the biggest ecommerce platforms in the world.

That scale and its nascent “Connected Trip” plans to integrate more flights, attractions, car rental and other experiences into its offering and put them in a unified and data-powered way in front of its users (the company’s data science engines already handle over 12 billion decisions per day), have put unprecedented pressure on this early internet-native travel company’s traditional monolithic, on-premises infrastructure.

Booking.com CTO Rob Francis: Great engineering got us this far…

The man in charge of keeping the lights on whilst modernising Booking.com’s digital underpinnings is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Rob Francis. Sitting down to speak with The Stack, the former director of corporate infrastructure at Amazon – where he led a migration of Amazon’s infrastructure from legacy data centres to AWS, before moving on to a CIO role at audio specialist Sonos – says it is “a pretty exciting time right now, because we are in the midst of reinventing our business; adding more verticals and experiences.”

As CTO, Francis is responsible for what Booking.com calls Central Technology.

“That’s a combination of things that are best done centrally. We also run things you find in a CISO organisation such as cyber and risk in addition to fraud prevention; the Chief Data Officer is also part of my team, so everything from Big Data to Machine Learning; core platforms that are part of the builder ecosystem – build, test, deploy, observability – support for languages and frameworks. We also started a new group a few years ago as part of our modernisation effort, called ‘Horizontal Business Services’”, he says, adding that under this rubric and as part of a shift away from a monolithic architecture “we’ve pulled out a couple of core capabilities that are business-agnostic: an order platform, and the identity platform for example…”