Better site performance for more online bookings

Based in Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific Airways is an award-winning international airline that offers scheduled passenger and cargo services to destinations around the world, carrying almost one million passengers each month. The company’s Web sites offer a convenient and low-cost way of communicating with over two million customers and partners every month, and provides a critical and secure communications channel with nearly 35,000 travel agents. However, in a 2003 study the airline realized that for some end users, site performance was anything buy award-winning. Outside of Hong Kong, performance degraded quickly, forcing users to wait an unreasonably long time for reservations and flight information, leading to abandonment and lost business opportunities.

Cathay Pacific’s choice to use Akamai was based on the “three C’s”: Cost, comfort, and confidence. They identified Akamai as the low cost solution compared with other providers or a home-grown infrastructure buildout. Their comfort level with Akamai was high given Akamai’s growing global reputation for excellence in delivery of technology solutions. And they had confidence that the Akamai solution, once deployed, would help Cathay Pacific realize a 10-30% savings from serving more customers more effectively online. The results speak for themselves; immediately upon deploying Akamai download times around the world decreased up to 65%. Online bookings increased more than 100% year over year. And serving more customers online means proportionally fewer calls to Cathay Pacific’s call center, generating an estimated savings of up to $1,500,000 annually.

Akamai helped Cathay Pacific improve global site performance and increase site traffic by 65%, without additional infrastructure. And save $1.5M a year in the process.