Irish airline and developers capitalizes on cloud to grow its business
16 December 2011
In this case study, you can read about how Aer Lingus scales up their operations with cloud computing and improves customer experience to drive revenue for the company.
Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Aer Lingus is Ireland’s oldest and second-largest airline serving Europe, North America, and northern Africa, catering to more than 10 million passengers each year.
Aer Lingus wanted an interactive Web application that would integrate its route maps with the online reservation and booking process to provide a more dynamic web experience for customers. More importantly, it wanted to have a call-to-action to help guide potential passengers directly from the map to the reservations and booking system.
“We saw an opportunity to drive ticket sales and revenue if we could find a solution that would make our route map more interactive and if it were directly connected to our booking system,” explains Ronan Fitzpatrick, Director of Network Distribution at Aer Lingus.
However, the airline needed the application to cost-effectively scale up as traffic dictated without negatively impacting bandwidth, and take up minimal computing resources on the airline’s existing infrastructure.
Aer Lingus turned to iPlanit, a Microsoft Certified Partner that specializes in interactive Web site design, e-commerce solutions, and marketing. iPlanit recognized that a hosted Web application using cloud services was the best solution to deliver the scalability and low-bandwidth capabilities that Aer Lingus required. As a growing company, iPlanit also needed a reliable cloud services provider that could help it deliver an enterprise-level Web application with a potential global reach.
iPlanit took just two months to build the web application called Dynamic Route Maps (www.dynamicroutemaps.com) for Aer Lingus on the Windows Azure platform. This included an interactive pop-up menu for each route line that gives customers the ability to book an airline ticket directly from the map.
“By using Windows Azure, we’re able to take the concept of a route map and add a call-to-action that improves the customer’s experience and drives revenue for Aer Lingus,” says Chad Gilmer, Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer at iPlanit.
By hosting the application in the cloud, the airline can now drive revenue, while delivering an interactive, compelling experience that helps customers discover new destinations, make travel plans, and book airline tickets. This is a cost-effective solution as Aer Lingus only pays for the computing power and storage that it uses, and furthermore, can scale anytime to handle the traffic.
What’s more, iPlanit found a cloud services provider that it can rely on as it takes Dynamic Route Maps to other airline companies, and plans to continue to extend its functionality in the future.
“We are delighted with the cloud computing model offered by Microsoft and Windows Azure,” explains Fitzpatrick. “We can dynamically scale for success without worrying about the availability of computing resources.”
You cand find the original case study here.
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