Egyptair,87 Years of Excellence

Founded in 1932 Egyptair provides scheduled passenger and freight services to more than 75 destinations worldwide. Egyptair is part of the Star Alliance, it is always dedicated to top quality services and first-class customer service. Flying more than 6 million passengers annually, Egyptair understands what it takes to become a distinguished global player in today’s overly crowded aviation market. With the proliferation of the hospitality industry especially e-hospitality most airline companies have shifted their focus on enhancing online sales as it shows great promise, realizing this potential Egyptair invested time and money to perfect its online portal.

Improved Response Time and GDPR Compliance a Marketing Boost in Need

Egyptair’s website performed basic flight search and reservation operations seamlessly but lacked attractive UI and suffered from slow response time; something you wouldn’t want to miss in today’s over saturated market. Added to that with the new GDPR in place Egyptair needed to quickly update its website in order to be compliant with the updated regulation. Having previous success with Gulf Air Azure migration Egyptair didn’t hesitate in choosing LDC. Our repeated success stories and strong partnership with Microsoft also played a crucial role in their decision.

MS Azure Migration with LDC, a Holistic Remedy for all Marketing Troubles 

Moving your hosting to the cloud is always good news especially when it is on Azure. Not only do you benefit from improved infrastructure management, but the front-end performance is drastically improved. With Egyptair’s lethargic response time and poor marketing footprint the move to Azure was just the magic spell needed. The move to Azure was an easy decision, not only are security measures heightened, site management simplified, and overall costs lowered, but thanks to the global availability of Azure data centers you can always ensure that your website is easily and swiftly accessed from anywhere on the globe. Azure can offer SLA’s with up to 99.9% up time, not to mention the advanced infrastructure of Azure which guarantees faster response time, fast enough to wow your customers. GDPR compliance is also one of Azure’s strongest points; a pain point Egyptair wanted to resolve.

Phased Migration in Record Time

The migration process was a complex operation, moving a website as sizable and busy as that of Egyptair lasted a whole business week. LDC set up a diverse team of web developers, architects and research and development engineers to plan out and implement the migration. After a brief period of planning, implementation was well on its way lasting a period of only one month. Implementation included setting up the infrastructure in two locations; North Europe and South East Asia, advanced infrastructure hardening techniques were employed as well as setting up high availability for the back end.  In addition, Azure Traffic Manager was also applied, the traffic manager allows for efficient load balancing across global Azure locations thus ensuring high availability and responsiveness.  Following implementation was an exhaustive testing phase that ensured the site would run error free. Finally, the new site hosted on Azure was launched, the whole project took only three months from start to end, a record time for moving and enhancing the performance of a busy airline reservation site.

Egyptair Chinese Website, a Model Worth Studying

While Azure migration in a short time might pose a challenge on its own, the real challenge was in developing the Chinese version of the website. China employs a complex firewall called the Great Firewall of China, its main role is to censor and block content that is considered unacceptable by the government. All internet traffic has to pass by the firewall, which slows down the responsiveness of any website. In addition, if any content or portion of the website is blocked it significantly slows down the loading of the rest of the page.  These design elements or components includes things such as using Google fonts, social media links, Google API usage, Google Map embedding or links to the Google Play store. LDC revamped the Chinese website and omitted the usage of any of the blocked components, resulting in reducing the response time of the Chinese website in half, and staying on top of the competition by having the lowest response time of 46.7 seconds.

Egyptair Realizes the Compounded Benefits of Azure Hosting

Azure hosting is the magic remedy to any hosting problems, transferring the hassles of hosting to an experienced cloud partner does not only render improved responsiveness but better security, compliance with GDPR, higher availability and cost effectiveness.  The implementation of the traffic manager and CDN technologies made Egyptair’s website resilient to any server failure thus ensuring 99.9% availability. Azure hosting also offers unbeatable scalability; Egyptair’s hosting needs can easily scale up or down based on business need or amount of traffic thus ensuring consistent performance of the website regardless of the traffic.

Impressive KPIs that Speak for itself

No numbers speak of the success of this project more than the page response and load time statistics that was collected pre and post migration. Not only were the numbers miraculously halved but they stood ahead of leading competition in the industry. These numbers were also achieved through various load testing, that subjected the site to varying number of hits.

Our collaboration with LDC was a story of success to boast about, we never imagined we could reach these striking numbers in such a short time. Reducing our response time in half had a direct impact on our bottom line as we saw site reservation go up by 19% globally and 30% in North and South Atlantic and the Far East. This project is definitely the beginning of many more successful projects to come.

Eng. Salah Kadri, GM E-commerce

Egyptair