Corrado is the Chief Technology Officer here at lm group. He leads the tech team who develop the products and services that power the entire traveller journey on lm groups websites. He also makes sure the travel company is kept operational and IT services are the best they can be. Having been part of the group for 15 years, he knows the company and industry inside and out. Corrado started his career as a software engineer, he rose through the ranks, and now sits on the executive leadership team.
Our tech teams’ face complex problems and challenges on a daily basis, collaborating with each other and stakeholders to find solutions in a fast-paced environment. We see ourselves as a tech company that travels and our high-traffic site ( we reach 60 million monthly users via our websites and app) means you can get real time feedback for any changes you make, be they positive or negative!
The travel industry is changing all the time, and the global move to digitalisation means we’ll grow our market share and traffic as more and more users search for and book their travel and leisure experiences online.
We’re using this momentum to grow our tech offering, which means we have more opportunities than ever to offer an agile and educational environment to develop your career in. Our focus is on flexible working, providing an organisational platform to help you shine and work that has purpose - where you can clearly see the impact your output has.
Getting to know us
I’ve asked my tech leaders, all superb professionals in their fields, to help me put together this introduction to how our tech team operates and the technologies we can leverage on - from the front-end languages and frameworks we use to our machine learning capabilities. So please bear with me while I get a little corporate, but I think it’s helpful to get an idea of the top level of the business before you go into a deeper dive of the core tech areas in our series of blog posts.
A bit about our business
When I said we had a complex business, it might help to know that we operate across multiple jurisdictions (17 languages and 40 countries), in compliance with different local rules. We are a publicly traded multinational Group, among the worldwide leaders in the traveltech domain, and we operate a portfolio of well-known brands such as lastminute.com, Volagratis, Rumbo, Weg.de, Bravofly.
We also get to offer travellers a wide range of travel related products and services: Flight, Hotel, Dynamic Package, Tour Operator package, Experience, Cruise, and Ancillary products such as Transfers, Luggage protection and much more.
Thanks to our diverse business models (OTA-META-Media-Comarketing) we cover all the steps of the customer journey:
Tech impacts everything
We’re proud to develop our own products and services, and take care of integrating third party software and services, across a set of use cases that vary greatly.
From the high-traffic of our marketplace to the highly regulated environment of payment and consent management (PCI, GDPR), and anything in between, our tech serves our end users and customers. We take care of our internal stakeholders as well, such as our Customer Care agents and HR, which is why we value collaboration and business acumen skills highly.
As you can imagine, the tech stack that can best cover our needs varies from use case to use case. So this blog series will take a look at the ecosystem of the technologies officially supported in the company, which we can combine to build the best tech stack for our applications, given the specific challenges of the use case at hand.
Lots of learning potential
So I’ve described lots of choices, and in this context the design phase of the product development process is very important for us. It’s where we understand what the problem is that we are solving, and what is the right technology to solve it. Through training and guidelines we help our people get orientated with the myriad of systems and complexities - we want you up to speed as soon as possible.
Travel is always evolving - and so will you
Of course the following is the picture as of December 2021. Change is inevitable, and what serves us well today can be replaced by something better tomorrow, that allows us to stay ahead of the game and best serve the business.
New technologies get frequently introduced to the business thanks to the continuous research conducted by our tech leaders and internal Communities of Practice, and we are aware that we need to be ready to manage their whole lifecycle, end to end, from development to production, maintenance, incident management, and decommissioning.
Want to discover more?
As a result of this innovation process our tech landscape is vast and fluid, but at any point in time there’s a given set of elements to choose from. Managing all of this requires great professionalism, and we are lucky enough to have great professionals among us. I’ve involved some of them in writing this blog series - let’s hear from them!
