Intuitive, one of the UK’s leading tour operating software and systems specialists, has announced it is working with Rackspace Hosting (NYSE:RAX) to help it support and manage soaring peaks in consumer demand on the popular UK holiday booking website, Lowcostholidays.com.

“We have been working with Rackspace for around three years now, steadily growing from one to five servers,” said Paul Nixon, Managing Director at intuitive Ltd. “However, since we secured the contract with lowcostholidays.com in 2009, we have had to develop a new infrastructure that overtime has grown to more than 20 servers, a number that would have been a massive headache to manage without Rackspace’s help.”

Lowcostholidays.com, which had previously experienced differing service levels with other hosting vendors and outages due to high volumes of traffic, needed a solution which could cope with 1 million searches per day and the 80 million package holidays which they generate and distribute each night.

Since working with intuitive Ltd and Rackspace, Lowcostholidays.com has seen its daily holiday searches increase by around 150%, with an additional 250,000 searches per day. This has lead to an overall increase in bookings for the last year of 127 per cent, compared to the same period the year before. In addition, its systems are now able to handle daily scans of over 80 airline providers and 300,000 hotels all at the same time to find the best deals at any time of the day.

Brian Thomson, EMEA Managing Director at Rackspace, comments: “lowcostholidays.com is one of the top 15 travel websites in the UK, and one of the most search-intensive on the internet. As such, it is crucial that we have the support we need to cope with spikes in demand to ensure they keep customers returning.

“To cater for this demand many companies are moving IT assets outside the organisation to companies such as intuitive Ltd as this enables more proactive time for innovation and the peace of mind that technology is managed by IT experts. By combining our solutions with intuitive’s outstanding service, users should benefit from a fast, reliable service which will save money and time when looking for a holiday.”