How Stratalis Enables Ferry Operators to Outmaneuver Competitors with Smart Pricing Solutions
Stratalis transformed a ferry operator's pricing challenges into competitive advantages through a decade-long partnership delivering reliable, tailor-made web scraping solutions that monitor complex ferry pricing dynamics.
The Challenge: Navigating the Complexity of Ferry Pricing
Running a ferry line in a competitive market is no smooth sailing. Unlike industries with off-the-shelf solutions, monitoring ferry pricing is a unique and intricate challenge:
- No ready-made tools exist for maritime passenger transport, a niche with relatively few providers.
- Dynamic pricing complexity: Fares vary based on passengers, vehicles, cabins, and more.
- Apples-to-oranges comparisons: Your offerings rarely align exactly with competitors'.
From the passenger’s perspective, booking a ferry is already a tedious process requiring multiple inputs to get a quote. For a ferry line, automating this for countless configurations—while remaining undetected—is a technical hurdle.
Ten years ago, a ferry operator turned to Stratalis with this challenge. Today, thanks to our bespoke solution, they’ve maintained hassle-free, competitive price monitoring ever since.
Our Solution: Smart Scraping Meets Long-Term Reliability
1. Custom Scraping Architecture
At the heart of our solution is a network of specialized scraping agents, each tailored to a specific competitor website. Handcrafted by Stratalis engineers, these agents mimic real users, filling in booking forms with the key scenarios our client needs to monitor.
Even with today’s AI-based tools, successful web scraping still requires precise engineering—and Stratalis delivers this expertise.
2. Overcoming Anti-Bot Protections
Web scraping isn’t set-and-forget. Over the years, competitors implemented advanced anti-bot protections to make monitoring harder.
Rather than default to expensive solutions like unblocking browsers and residential proxies (which can cost up to $15 per GB of data, more than 100 times the cost of regular traffic), we took a smarter, cost-effective approach:
- Investigated detection methods to make our agents more stealthy.
- Fine-tuned agent code to avoid triggers.
- Upgraded to an efficient, moderately priced proxy pool.
This ROI-oriented approach substitutes one-off engineering effort for high operating costs, saving our clients hundreds of thousands of dollars annually while optimizing for performance.
3. Hassle-Free Maintenance for a Decade
Websites evolve constantly—on average, major updates occur every two years, with minor changes annually. Each update risks breaking a scraper.
Stratalis solves this with proactive maintenance:
- Resilient design: Our agents rely on stable page markers, reducing sensitivity to changes.
- Rapid response: When a competitor updates their site in the morning, we implement fixes that same afternoon—a level of responsiveness that’s part of our operational DNA.
- Proven processes: With over 1,000 active scraping agents, maintaining bots is second nature to us. Unlike in-house teams juggling a handful of scripts, we’ve built tools and workflows to detect and repair changes efficiently.
This reliability ensures that our client avoids costly downtime, maintaining their competitive edge.
4. Practical, Dependable Results
The ultimate outcome? Reliable, actionable data that drives results. Stratalis delivers daily CSV files that seamlessly integrate with clients’ systems, enabling dynamic pricing strategies, precise promotions, and rapid responses to market changes—all with minimal human oversight.
We call this “boring technology” because it just works. No flashy features, no unnecessary complexity—just consistent results. Behind this simplicity, our technology stack and processes continue to evolve, ensuring our scraping solutions remain efficient, reliable, and adapted to the changing web landscape.
The Stratalis Difference
For over a decade, our client has benefited from uninterrupted, cost-effective pricing intelligence—despite evolving challenges. Whether it’s handling anti-bot defenses or scaling effortlessly, Stratalis delivers peace of mind through expertise, precision, and reliability.