CWT is a global leader in business travel management, serving corporate and government clients around the world. Headquartered in Minneapolis with offices across the globe, CWT offers services ranging from air and hotel bookings to transportation, meetings, and event coordination. To support its complex operations, CWT has invested heavily in modernizing its technology stack—transitioning toward a microservice-based architecture built with Java and Spring Boot, deployed on AWS using Docker and ECS.

Peter Li, who leads a large software development team at CWT, joined the company over six years ago to help drive this modernization. His team, spread across the U.S. and Manila, plays a pivotal role in enabling CWT’s digital service transformation.

As CWT began its journey toward a microservices architecture, it quickly became clear that an API gateway was essential to orchestrate the growing number of services. The company needed a solution that could scale globally to support both internal applications and external client integrations, offer flexibility in deployment models as their container strategies evolved, maintain high availability with low operational overhead, and support secure authentication and easy plugin customization. CWT also required a solution that could handle a hybrid infrastructure—spanning both AWS and on-prem environments—while staying performant and reliable.

After evaluating several vendors, CWT selected Kong Gateway for its feature-rich architecture, deployment flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. A successful proof of concept led to the adoption of Kong across multiple environments.

Today, CWT runs three Kong instances: two managed by Peter’s team in a data center in Nevada and AWS, and a third in China, operated by a joint venture team. All three instances follow a consistent architecture, utilizing Dockerized deployments and Postgres databases in a primary-standby configuration.

Kong now supports over 300 internal services and 24 external-facing APIs, all secured primarily with OAuth 2.0 and JWT authentication. CWT has also developed custom plugins using Lua to meet specific business needs.

Key use cases include custom APIs for client integrations, travel profile lifecycle APIs replacing legacy HR FTP uploads, trip approval APIs for managers, carbon emissions reporting using sustainability APIs, and integration with global distribution systems and aggregators for air, rail, and car content. Kong’s flexibility and extensibility enabled CWT to build a robust and responsive API infrastructure that underpins critical business workflows and client-facing features.

Kong has proven to be a highly reliable and low-maintenance solution for CWT. Since implementation, the platform has delivered exceptional stability and performance. In fact, the only significant outage occurred when internal IT staff rebooted systems without prior notice—an issue unrelated to Kong itself. Day to day, services remain fast and responsive, even as usage scales across global environments.

The development team has benefited from Kong’s ease of use and extensibility. Creating and deploying custom plugins through Docker images has streamlined operations, while consistent security has been maintained at scale—95% of services use OAuth 2.0 authentication. With over 300 internal services and 24 external-facing APIs already live, CWT continues to expand its API landscape.

Looking ahead, the team is exploring several enhancements. They plan to roll out the Kong Developer Portal to simplify client onboarding and documentation, externalize sustainability APIs to make them client-facing, and evaluate opportunities for API monetization to support long-term business strategy.