About Metropolitan Touring
Metropolitan Touring is Ecuador’s leading inbound tourism company with more than 70 years of experience in the travel industry. The company operates three luxury hotels — Mashpi Lodge, Finch Bay Galapagos Hotel, and Casa Gangotena — as well as three luxury expedition vessels in the Galápagos Islands: Santa Cruz II, Yacht La Pinta, and Yacht Isabela II.
Each brand has its own website, digital content strategy, and booking flows, making performance and stability critical for guest engagement and sales. David Pulloquinga, Coordinator of New Technologies, oversees a portfolio of 12 websites spanning hotels, cruises, B2B platforms, and promotional brands.
Behind every seamless booking and inspiring travel page is a digital infrastructure that has to work flawlessly, at scale, around the clock. When that infrastructure started holding the business back, Metropolitan Touring made a decisive move to Cloudways, and the results speak for themselves. Read the case study to find out how.
Cloudways: David, to get us started, could you tell us about your role at Metropolitan Touring and the websites you’re responsible for?
David Pulloquinga: As Coordinator of New Technologies, I’m responsible for the digital infrastructure that powers Metropolitan Touring’s entire online presence.
The portfolio includes the company’s corporate site, individual hotel and vessel websites, a B2B portal, promotional platforms, and travel content brands — 12 websites in total.
Each site serves a distinct audience and commercial purpose, from luxury hotel bookings to Galápagos cruise inquiries, making uptime, speed, and centralized management non-negotiable.
The websites I manage include:
- Metropolitan Touring
- Metrojourneys
- Casa Gangotena
- Finch Bay Galapagos Hotel
- Mashpi Lodge
- Galapagos Cruise
- Yacht La Pinta
- Yacht Isabela II
- Sea Lion Yacht
- Cruises Ecuador
- Metropolitan Touring Portal
- Metropolitan Touring Escape
– Metropolitan Touring is celebrating 70 years of curating luxury travel experiences across Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru. (Source: Metropolitan Touring)
Cloudways: Before you made the switch, what was it like managing your hosting? What were the main pain points?
David Pulloquinga: Before migrating to Cloudways, our web infrastructure was spread across multiple shared and traditional hosting providers, including WP Engine. This fragmentation created serious operational and technical challenges.
There was no centralized management — each website lived in a separate hosting account, making administration complex and error-prone.
Shared resources and inconsistent server configurations caused slow loading times and high TTFB across the portfolio.
Seasonal traffic peaks frequently stressed our servers, putting lead generation at risk during the busiest travel periods.
On top of that, every provider had different backup and deployment tools, so standardization was impossible, and our security posture was inconsistent across hosts.
And after all of that, we were still paying between $800 and $1,000 per month without getting the performance or features the business truly needed.
Cloudways: How did those day-to-day struggles with hosting affect your team, their workflow, and their ability to try new things?
David Pulloquinga: The instability and complexity of managing multiple hosting environments held us back considerably.
With IT resources constantly tied up handling fragmented infrastructure, it was very difficult for our marketing, development, and content teams to collaborate efficiently or pursue new digital initiatives with confidence.
We had many ideas for improving our websites — from refining page performance to building custom applications using Git-based DevOps workflows — but the limitations of our old setup made consistent execution a real challenge.
Cloudways: What was the final push that made you decide to switch, and what stood out about Cloudways when you were evaluating your options?
David Pulloquinga: When evaluating new providers, Cloudways stood out on several fronts. The flexibility to choose from leading cloud infrastructure options like AWS and DigitalOcean was something traditional hosting simply couldn’t match.
– Cloudways offers flexible, transparent pricing across leading cloud providers, giving businesses like Metropolitan Touring the freedom to scale without overpaying.
The Cloudways pricing was highly competitive, and the platform’s management tools promised to finally simplify what had been a very complex, multi-account operation. The quality of the support — with resolution times of 20 to 30 minutes — was also a decisive factor for us.
The migration itself exceeded our expectations. Cloudways’ migration tools and support team enabled us to move numerous high-traffic websites with minimal downtime, which was critical because every hour of unavailability can mean lost bookings for us.
What could have been a very daunting project turned out to be a smooth, well-supported transition.
– The Cloudways Support gives Metropolitan Touring’s team the confidence to manage their websites, including priority live chat, proactive monitoring, and dedicated account management.
Cloudways: Now that you’re on Cloudways, what does managing your portfolio of sites actually look like day to day?
David Pulloquinga: The difference has been transformative. All 12 websites are now managed within a single unified dashboard, which has dramatically reduced our operational overhead and simplified workflows across IT, marketing, and development.
Deployments are safer and faster thanks to unified staging environments and standardized backup processes.
We also use Git-based DevOps pipelines for development and deployment, which has further accelerated our maintenance and update cycles across the entire portfolio.
The Cloudflare Enterprise integration available through Cloudways has been a standout addition — it has significantly enhanced our security, performance, caching, and global content delivery at a cost that simply would not have been feasible if we had purchased it directly from Cloudflare.
Cloudways: You’ve mentioned improvements across the board. Can you share any specific numbers — on costs, performance, or anything else?
David Pulloquinga: The results have been significant on both fronts.
On cost, we went from paying $800 to $1,000 per month down to approximately $400 to $500 per month — a reduction of more than 50%. For context, running a comparable setup with another provider would cost around $2,000 per month, so the savings are substantial.
On performance, we’ve documented measurable improvements across the portfolio, including reduced Time to First Byte (TTFB), stronger Core Web Vitals scores across LCP, FID, and CLS, faster loading times on both desktop and mobile, and higher Lighthouse performance scores.
– Metropolitan Touring’s website scored a perfect 100 on Google PageSpeed Insights, with a First Contentful Paint of 0.4s and Largest Contentful Paint of 0.6s. (Source: Google)
These gains have had a direct impact on our SEO, user experience, and ultimately our conversions — with more visitors staying on-site and submitting booking inquiries through our online forms.
Cloudways: Support is a major concern for many teams managing this many live sites. What has your experience been like?
David Pulloquinga: Support has been one of the most consistently valuable parts of working with Cloudways.
Both the Standard and Advanced support tiers have delivered fast response times, proactive follow-ups, and technically solid guidance — with most issues resolved within 20 to 30 minutes.
For a team managing 12 live websites across hotels, cruises, and B2B platforms, that level of responsiveness provides genuine operational confidence. It removes the anxiety that used to come with managing complex infrastructure across multiple providers.
Cloudways: Beyond the technical improvements, has moving to Cloudways given your team back time to focus on what matters most?
David Pulloquinga: Absolutely. With everything consolidated in one place, we no longer need to juggle multiple hosting accounts, navigate different provider interfaces, or manually coordinate fragmented processes.
– The Cloudways platform gives David’s team full control over server management, including monitoring, security, backups, and vertical scaling, from a single unified dashboard.
Time previously absorbed by infrastructure management is now redirected toward building better customer experiences, developing new digital features, and pursuing creative initiatives that were hard to prioritize before.
Cloudways: Your slogan is “Your journey inspires us.” With a reliable platform underneath you now, what new journeys are you inspired to build for your customers online?
David Pulloquinga: With a fast, stable, and scalable platform in place, we’re focused on enriching every touchpoint of the online customer journey.
The improvements in page speed and Core Web Vitals have already boosted our SEO rankings and brought more qualified visitors to our sites.
We’re investing that momentum into refining the details that convert visitors into guests — improving lead capture, enhancing content across our hotel and cruise brands, and developing platforms like the B2B Portal, which is a web application focused on agencies in the B2B market.
– Metropolitan Touring’s B2B portal, built to inspire travelers with curated Ecuador experiences, is now running on Cloudways infrastructure. (Source: Metropolitan Touring)
Cloudways: Finally, if someone in the travel and tourism industry asked you whether they should consider Cloudways, what would you tell them?
David Pulloquinga: I would tell them that the platform makes server and application management much simpler, the pricing is genuinely competitive, and the support is fast, reliable, and always willing to help, which gives you a lot of confidence when you’re responsible for this many live properties.
Cloudways offers performance, scalability, and value that I haven’t found elsewhere.
For us, it has truly become a strategic partner in our digital infrastructure, not just a hosting provider, and it has significantly improved the way we manage our entire operation.
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