From unstable to unstoppable – Reliable Ticketing for Europa-Park’s Visitors

freiheit.com ensures a seamless park opening for Europa-Park's 50th anniversary

How it all started

Europa-Park welcomes their visitors with over 100 attractions on 95 hectares of land.

This makes it the most visited theme park in Germany. It even won the “Golden Ticket Award” for the best theme park worldwide already multiple times.

It all started in the 18th century when the Mack family first became known for its wagon construction. Since the 1870s the company Mack Rides has been building carousels and rides for showmen. In 1921 they built their first roller coaster.

The Europa-Park was founded in 1975. Since then the theme park has been family owned.

In 2002 Europa-Park launched their first Online Ticket Shop with an external partner to sell entrance tickets online for the first time.

Over the years Europa-Park grew the whole resort with more attractions and events. With these additions to the park they needed an Online Ticket Shop that was able to provide multiple ticket options.

So in 2019 they customized a new Online Ticket Shop to their needs.
But the architecture was lacking in terms of speed (latency) and efficient resource usage which made the system harder to understand, debug, maintain and scale. Additionally it was not easy to update and maintain the system. Why? In order to deploy updates they had to shut down the shop completely.

When the online ticket sales became more important – driven by the Corona pandemic – and increased to over 80% of all ticket sales, the Online Ticket Shop couldn’t keep up with these raised demands reliably. This led e.g. to longer loading times or in the worst case going down completely.

On top of that the Europa-Park planned to celebrate their 50th anniversary with a big park-opening in March 2025. On this day, nothing could go wrong.

This is why Europa-Park called the Hamburg-based software engineering company freiheit.com, where software made in Germany means delivering always on time, on budget, on target and on quality. They wanted a stable and reliable Online Ticket Shop for the season start in 2025.

The solution

As a first step the freiheit.com engineering team had a look into the codebase to really understand the system of the Online Ticket Shop.

One thing was clear: They needed to set up a new infrastructure to ensure a stable environment. In software, an infrastructure refers to all the foundational systems and components that are necessary to develop, run, manage and scale software applications – like hardware resources, development and monitoring tools. Meaning it is essential to have this stable.

After only six weeks, they went live with the new infrastructure to have enough time to test if everything works as expected.

To make sure that the new infrastructure of the Online Ticket Shop could scale to the predicted higher demands on the park-opening day the engineering team did load testings in advance. They set up database replicas and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA), together they automatically handle increased traffic or load effectively without crashing or slowing down.

On the park-opening day, everything worked as expected. The Online Ticket Shop was stable the whole day. Each visitor bought their ticket and scanned it at the entrance without any complications creating a great start into their day at Europa-Park. Everything ran smoothly. This made it the most relaxed park-opening for Europa-Park employees since years. A great success.