Search profile · Travel Agencies
Travel agencies: a holiday search is a fan-out, not a query
Your search page is not slow because of your server; it is slow because it is waiting on four suppliers and reporting the worst of them.
The short answer
A travel search does not run one query, it fans out to several suppliers and then waits. The response time your customer experiences is the slowest supplier in the set, not the average, which is why a search that usually takes two seconds occasionally takes eleven and nobody can reproduce it.
So the target is not a faster search, it is a faster first impression. Return the page skeleton in under 800 milliseconds, stream results in as each supplier answers, and cap every supplier call with a timeout so one slow partner cannot hold the whole page.
Your own pages sit on NVMe behind a LiteSpeed cache with free SSL, engineer-run migration and 24/7 support included, from $2.42/mo renewing at that same rate.
By the HostingFast team · Reviewed 12 August 2026
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Two very different sites live on one travel agency domain. There are destination guides, which are content: text, photography, occasionally a video. And there is search, which is an integration: availability, pricing, currency, and a booking handoff.
They need opposite treatment. The guides are entirely cacheable and should be among the fastest pages you own. Search is uncacheable by nature and its performance is mostly decided by systems that belong to other companies.
Measuring them as one site produces a meaningless average. This page separates them, and spends most of its time on the half that is harder: the fan-out.
What a fan-out does to your timings
If your search calls four suppliers in parallel and waits for all of them, your response time is the slowest of the four. Statistically that is much worse than the typical supplier response: with four calls, an occasional slow one becomes a frequent slow search. This is why averages mislead so badly here.
Watch it happen. Open the Network panel, run a search, and look at the request timings side by side. If your own endpoint takes six seconds while every asset on the page took under a hundred milliseconds, you are looking at a wait, not a workload, and no amount of server tuning will shorten it.
Show something in under a second
The fix is architectural rather than infrastructural. Return the page immediately with a skeleton: the search summary, the filters, and placeholder rows. Then fill in results as each supplier answers, so a customer sees progress rather than a spinner. Perceived speed and measured speed diverge here, and perceived speed is what keeps people on the page.
Give each supplier call an explicit timeout, five seconds at most, and render what you have when it fires. A search that returns three suppliers' results promptly beats one that returns four eventually, because the fourth one arrives after the customer has left.
Destination guides are the cacheable half
Guides should be the fastest pages on the site and often are not, because they are where the photography lives. Resize before upload, let the built-in WebP conversion run, lazy-load anything below the fold and give every image explicit dimensions.
Once that is done they cache cleanly, and LiteSpeed serves them without starting PHP. That matters more than it looks: guides are usually your organic traffic, so the pages doing your marketing are also the cheapest pages you serve. Aim for under 2.5 seconds to largest paint on a throttled mobile profile.
Keep the currency switcher from splitting your cache
If a currency or language selector changes the page content, every variant is a separate cached copy, and your cache hit rate divides by the number of variants. Three currencies and two languages is six copies of every guide, each one cold most of the time.
Where the difference is cosmetic, apply it in the browser rather than on the server so one cached page serves everybody. Where it genuinely changes content, accept the split but keep the variant count small and deliberate. Check the effect by timing the same guide in each currency with a cold cache and comparing.
Two sites on one domain, both handled
LiteSpeed caching makes destination guides almost free to serve, and NVMe storage keeps the search endpoints quick on the part of the work that is genuinely yours.
Free SSL, engineer-run migration, daily backups and 24/7 human support come on every plan, with no setup fee and renewals at the sign-up rate.
- LiteSpeed over destination guides and editorial
- NVMe under the search endpoints
- WebP conversion for destination photography
- Staging clones for supplier integration work
Why HostingFast
Standard on every plan
Guides served from cache
LiteSpeed returns a destination guide without starting PHP, so your organic traffic is also your cheapest traffic.
NVMe under the search
Search endpoints cannot be cached, so fast storage keeps the part of the work that belongs to you as short as possible.
Photography compressed
Built-in WebP conversion cuts destination image weight with no plugin licence and no manual export step.
A clone for integration work
Test a supplier API change or a timeout policy on a staging copy before a customer runs a search through it.
Mail that reaches travellers
MailChannels handles outbound delivery, so a quote or itinerary email is not filtered on the way.
Support at any hour
Humans on the desk around the clock, with first replies targeted at two hours and one hour when a site is down.
Quick Start
From order to online
- 1
Watch a search in the Network panel
Run a real search with DevTools recording and compare your endpoint's timing against everything else on the page. The gap tells you it is a wait, not a workload.
- 2
Return a skeleton first
Send the page immediately with placeholder rows, then stream results as suppliers answer. Aim to have something on screen inside 800 milliseconds.
- 3
Cap and count the variants
Give every supplier call a five-second timeout, and check how many currency or language copies of each guide your cache is holding.
Built In
Loaded onto every plan
- LiteSpeed caching across destination guides and editorial pages
- NVMe SSD under the uncacheable search endpoints
- Built-in WebP conversion for destination photography
- Staging clones for supplier integration changes
- Per-site PHP versions, changed from the control panel
- MailChannels delivering itinerary and quote email
- Free SSL that never needs a diary entry
- A daily backup you can roll back to unaided
- No setup fee, and renewals at the original rate
- 24/7 support, whichever time zone the enquiry came from
Frequently Asked
What people ask us most often
Why is my search sometimes fast and sometimes very slow?
Because it waits on several suppliers and reports the slowest. With four parallel calls, an occasional slow supplier becomes a frequently slow search, and the average hides it completely. Watch the request timings during a real search and you will see one call dominating the rest.
What should a customer see while a search runs?
A skeleton: the search summary, the filters and placeholder rows, delivered in under 800 milliseconds. Then stream results in as each supplier answers. Progress keeps people on the page in a way a spinner never does, and it costs nothing in infrastructure.
Does a currency switcher affect performance?
It does if it changes the page on the server, because each currency becomes a separate cached copy and your hit rate divides accordingly. Where the difference is only display formatting, do it in the browser so one cached page serves every visitor.
Should destination guides and search share the same plan?
They can, and usually should, because the guides are cached and cost very little to serve. What matters is measuring them separately: one number for a cached guide on a throttled mobile profile, and one for a live search, because they are different problems.
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