Minimum Bandwidth Needed

For many of the 10 million passengers that Dublin, Ireland-based Aer Lingus flies every year to destinations as far-flung as Marrakech and Dubai, the first step in booking a flight starts at the airline’s website. While some customers already have a destination in mind and can proceed directly to purchasing tickets, Aer Lingus recognized that a sizeable number of the visitors to its site are still evaluating travel options. Until recently, the website offered those customers only a static route map.

Ronan Fitzpatrick, director of Network Distribution at Aer Lingus, says that by lacking an online call-to-action to visually guide passengers from the map to the reservations system, the airline was missing out on an opportunity to drive revenue.

“We saw an untapped opportunity to drive ticket sales by making our route map more interactive and connecting it to our booking system,” says Fitzpatrick. He adds that to succeed in its goal, the application would need to scale up quickly at peak traffic times, such as during the holiday season, while taking up minimum bandwidth and computing resources on the airline’s existing infrastructure.

For help, Aer Lingus turned to iPlanit, a Microsoft Certified Partner that specializes in interactive website design. iPlanit recognized that a hosted Web application using cloud services was the best solution to meet the airline’s scalability and low-bandwidth criteria. After evaluating other hosting options, including Rackspace, iPlanit decided to build the Aer Lingus Web application on the Windows Azure platform.

Chad Gilmer, co-founder and chief executive officer at iPlanit, says that his team developed Dynamic Route Maps, which extends the static route map by including interactive pop-up menus for each route and providing the ability to book an airline ticket directly from the map. Customers can now explore destinations, find inspiration for vacations, and book their airline tickets in the same interactive Web application. At the same time, the new app ensures easy and direct capture of customers’ orders.

Gilmer adds that, by going the Windows Azure route, Aer Lingus has been able to serve Web-site traffic from across the globe without having to add any bandwidth to its network, and without impacting the performance of its Web site.

“By using datacenters here in Dublin that feed through Windows Azure to the nearest location to the user, we truly enjoy global reach and bandwidth isn’t a concern at all,” says Gilmer.

With the initial success of Dynamic Route Maps, iPlanit plans to extend the functionality of the Aer Lingus application. Plans include integrating Bing Maps into the application so that passengers can easily access additional information about their destination, such as maps of hotels and other attractions.