2011 Frequent Traveler Awards

The Frequent Traveler Awards honor the best in member rewards programs from the hotel and airline industry. Broken down by region, voters around the world rate the best frequent flyer and frequent guest programs across several categories. In 2011, Solertium worked with the team from The Frequent Traveler Education Foundation to build a robust ballot application to manage the voting period.

The voting application needed to be available around the clock for the 30-day balloting period. Traffic arrived in huge waves as each hospitality program enlisted its membership's support. We chose Google App Engine and its High Replication data store for affordable, high availability, scalable hosting.

The ballots are translated into five languages. We used Google Web Toolkit's ability to produce multiple permutations and isolate the translations behind code splits, to keep the initial download size small, and enable translation on the fly. Google Analytics Events provided realtime monitoring of the balloting process, and reCAPTCHA assured the integrity of the ballots against automated scripting.

Management and administration scripts, written in Ruby, automated the exchange of data with Foundation staff via Excel spreadsheets.