Every year, the holiday season puts extraordinary pressure on industries we rarely think of as seasonal powerhouses. While retailers dominate the headlines, there are many other companies that also quietly absorb the surge in traffic, transactions, and consumer expectation. Today we’ll focus on travel platforms, gambling and sportsbook operators, and fintech and payment providers. These sectors don’t just experience a bump; they face explosive, non-negotiable spikes that demand unwavering availability, real-time accuracy, and the ability to scale on command.
These organizations operate in environments where downtime isn’t an inconvenience, it’s a direct hit to revenue, trust, and compliance. And yet, most consumers glide through the season unaware of the immense operational complexity behind a flawless booking, instant wager settlement, or seamless credit card payment. This blog celebrates these unsung holiday heroes and spotlights how three leaders in travel, gambling, and fintech modernized their data infrastructure with CockroachDB to survive and thrive during their busiest season of the year.
Booking.com: Refactoring order management for resilience 
Research has found that the global online travel market was valued at $566 billion in 2024 and is forecasted to reach $1.37 trillion by 2033. Just this Thanksgiving weekend, TSA tweeted that they had screened over $3 million travelers on November 30 alone. With 80% of travelers viewing online booking as essential, it’s no surprise that Booking.com, one of the world’s leading digital travel companies, decided to revisit their data infrastructure a few years ago.
Booking.com’s Order Platform handles hotel and flight reservations and serves as the source of truth for booking data across user interfaces and backend systems. Originally built on Cassandra, the platform relied on complex, fragile pipelines to replicate data and ensure the databases stay in sync in near real-time. This architecture created challenges with latency, data consistency, and ongoing maintenance, all while lacking ACID guarantees.
CockroachDB allowed Booking.com to simplify this stack and bring core operations back into a single, resilient system. ACID compliance, secondary indexes, and native CDC removed the need for redundant services and reduced the team’s cognitive load. While the shift meant accepting a tradeoff in write availability to gain consistency, the benefits in reliability and cost efficiency made the decision clear. As Booking.com prepares for a tenfold increase in traffic, CockroachDB's architecture and cross-region capabilities ensure they are ready to scale with confidence.
FanDuel: Scaling to support America’s 1 sportsbook
While gambling often sits in the background of holiday commerce, December is one of its most powerful months. Lottery activity alone surges dramatically with sales jumping up to 30% compared with the average month, thanks to gift buying, office pools, and year-end mega-jackpots. The digital side tells a similar story: online gambling platforms consistently see holiday-period spikes, fueled by more free time, targeted promotions, and major sports events.
FanDuel, the #1 sportsbook operator in the U.S., needed to modernize its financial ledger system to support a unified wallet experience across its suite of sports betting, casino, fantasy, and racing products. Additionally, they needed to find a quicker way to enter new states as soon as it became legal, which meant spinning up a new database instance so they could comply with regulatory requirements.
Their Percona MySQL setup couldn’t keep pace with increasing transaction volumes and regulatory complexity. Vertical scaling limits, slow failovers, and manual reconfiguration created performance and availability risks. By migrating to CockroachDB, FanDuel unlocked horizontal scalability and eliminated the operational bottlenecks of their legacy system. The new ledger is able to handle distributed and concurrent reads and writes even for large-scale events. They operate across 28 sites where they are able to handle every customer deposit, withdraw, and payout with guaranteed correctness.
With this new distributed foundation in place, FanDuel is ready to expand into new states as they legalize without database limitations slowing them down. They are also ready for the influx of traffic during the holiday season, followed by the NFL Playoffs which is one of the most popular times of year for sportsbetting.
How SumUp scaled to 10,000 payments per minute with CockroachDB
Holiday shopping doesn’t just rely on retailers, it runs on payments infrastructure. On Cyber Monday alone, U.S. consumers spent $14.7 billion. Payment choice has become a major competitive edge: more than one in three consumers now select retailers based on the payment methods they support. Behind the scenes, payment processors are working harder than almost any other industry, transaction volumes can spike 50–80% above normal in November and December. And as Mastercard’s holiday analysis shows, overall U.S. retail sales continue to climb steadily, with 3.6% YoY growth and 7.9% online growth.
As Europe's leading mobile point-of-sale (POS) provider, SumUp supports over 4 million merchants across 36 markets with tools for payments, invoicing, and loyalty programs. But as the company grew globally, its legacy database, based on AWS RDS for PostgreSQL, couldn’t keep up, creating performance bottlenecks, downtime risks, and operational complexity. To build a truly global, always-on platform, SumUp needed a resilient, scalable database that could deliver horizontal scalability, ACID compliant transactions, was PCI-DSS compliant, survive AZ outages, and provide seamless multi-region operations without sacrificing developer efficiency.
After evaluating several databases, SumUp selected CockroachDB for its strict serializability, global consistency, and resilience. The team implemented a zero-downtime migration using Kafka and Debezium to dual-write between systems, ensuring uninterrupted service. Today, CockroachDB powers SumUp’s payment processing platform, enabling it to handle over 1 billion transactions annually and 10,000 payments per minute, with zero data loss or downtime. With CockroachDB, SumUp has modernized its infrastructure and future-proofed its ability to deliver reliable, global payment services.
Companies must build for peak traffic
The holiday season exposes one universal truth about high-volume, high-stakes digital businesses: systems built for “ordinary” traffic simply can’t withstand peak traffic. Travel platforms must manage unpredictable surges in bookings; gambling operators face massive spikes tied to major sports events and seasonal behavior; fintech providers handle some of the most intense payment volumes of the year. Each of these industries depends on infrastructure that can scale effortlessly, remain globally consistent, and stay available even when chaos hits.
Across Booking.com, FanDuel, and SumUp, a common theme emerges: replacing fragile, monolithic, or manually maintained systems with a resilient, horizontally scalable database foundation doesn’t just improve performance, it unlocks entirely new levels of reliability, compliance, and operational simplicity. With CockroachDB, these companies aren’t merely coping with holiday demand; they’re transforming it into an opportunity to grow with confidence.
As consumers, we may never see the engineering feats that power a perfectly timed flight booking, a real-time wager, or a frictionless payment. But behind the scenes, these organizations, and the technology that supports them, are working harder than ever. They are the true unsung heroes of the holiday season.
