So damn spot on. Read it.

Great narrative... Enlightening, and sobering.

At Room Key we're investigating Datomic. It's definitely interesting.

At Room Key we're using Amazon's DNS solution for load balancing (lowest latency).

When Amazon came out with DNS-based load-balancing, we thought about switching, but it'd be a downgrade from what we've got already. We direct traffic to the server that's showing the lowest latency right now and switch to another server if the measured latency changes. Amazon's latency data will be much slower to adapt to network conditions, and with DNS caching, it wouldn't provide fail-over if the lowest-latency server happened to go down or become unreachable.

Amazon's scheme is pretty nifty though, and we'd definitely use it if we didn't already have a more dynamic solution already in place.

Since we send the visitor off to the owning hotel chain's website to book, we don't have to manage the complexity of update such as you're describing.

Hi, I'm the author. We are a new online travel agency (OTA), like pricline, et. al., but different in that we don't take the booking - we send you off to the actual hotel website to book.

So the hotels have finally worked out lastminute.co is bad for them and started offering affiliate fees? Interesting - that could open up a lot of options - is that how it's working for you?

I'm not complaining. :)