Apollo Community Chicago Meetup - Experience API at Expedia: Lessons from Scaling a Graph Across Brands and Teams

About this Meetup

Expedia Group has been in the online travel game for over 25 years—and with success came complexity. After growing through acquisitions and expanding a portfolio of travel brands, they faced a big challenge: how do you deliver a seamless traveler experience when your tech stacks are anything but?

At this in-person Apollo Community Meetup, platform leaders Rick Fast (SVP of Platform) and Saurav Tapader (API Platform Lead) will share how Expedia identified graph-based API orchestration as the key to unlocking speed, consistency, and flexibility at scale. They’ll walk us through the evolution of their Experience API platform—from early proof-of-value wins to its central role powering every customer-facing app and site across the company. Christopher Winsor (Principal Architect) will also join us to share how their micro frontend system (“Shared UI”) works, and what they’ve learned exploring the boundaries of server-driven UI.

Come for the story, stay for the lessons—and bring your questions for a candid conversation about what it really takes to scale a graph across teams, brands, and platforms.

• 📆 Wednesday, May 21, 2025

• 🕛 5:30 pm CT

• 📍 Expedia Chicago building *

*Please register to receive event updates and building access instructions.

What to expect

• Behind-the-scenes insights into Expedia Group’s journey adopting a graph-based API architecture to unify a complex tech ecosystem.

• Real-world wins and lessons learned from early proof-of-value experiments to full-scale adoption across all customer-facing apps.

• A deep dive into platform strategy with Rick Fast and Saurav Tapader, including how the Experience API powers Expedia’s products.

• Candid Q&A with platform leaders—ask your toughest questions about scaling graphs, cross-team collaboration, and building for performance at scale.

• Networking with the Apollo community over snacks, drinks, and good conversation.

Doors open at 5:30 pm for networking and light snacks. The featured discussion will start immediately following. We look forward to welcoming you!

What is the Apollo Community?

The Apollo Community brings together strategic API thought leaders and GraphQL practitioners in a shared safe place that offers encouragement, support, confidence, guidance, career networking, and architectural and social proof points necessary to make each champion more confident and more effective in their efforts to advance federated GraphQL.