How Ryanair Reduced Booking Time from 5 to Less Than 2 Minutes: Couchbase Connect 2015

How Ryanair Reduced Booking Time from 5 to Less Than 2 Minutes: Couchbase Connect 2015 from Couchbase

Ryanair is the largest European airline by scheduled passengers carried and the busiest international airline by passenger numbers. Last year, the company was facing major performance and user experience issues due to their traditional REST mobile architecture. Intermittent network connectivity coupled with scaling challenges was resulting in booking times taking at least 5 minute to complete. Now, with Couchbase Mobile, Ryanair provides a truly amazing user experience for its 3+ million mobile users, having decreased booking time to under 2 minutes. In this session, Vladimir will go through the Ryanair mobile architecture, why the team moved to Couchbase Mobile, and how the Ryanair mobile user experience has been completely revamped.

Published in: Travel, Technology

Transcript

• 1. How Ryanair Reduced Booking Process from 5 Minutes To Less Than 2 Minutes
• 2. Ryanair - Lead Developer Vladimir Atanasov Lead developer - Android team @vladoatanasov, atanasovv@ryanair.com
• 3. ! 30th birthday of Ryanair low fares in Europe ! Europe’s No 1 traffic – 100m customers/year ! Europe’s No 1 coverage – 73 bases ! 1600 daily flights ! 190 destinations in 30 countries ! Fleet of 330 Boeing 737-800 (380 new) Europe’s No. 1 Coverage
• 4. Europe’s No. 1 Market Share
• 5. Saving Europe’s Customers €11.7bn Per Year Average Ryanair fare: €46 Average competitor fare: €163 Average Ryanair saving: €117 2014/2015 customers: 100,000,000 Ryanair’s customers save €11.7bn
• 6. Always Getting Better Always Getting Better Ryanair has a new customer-centric focus
• 7. Positive Feedback “ Ryanair's strategy of being nicer to customers has had a bigger impact on its performance than lower oil prices which have benefited some airlines in the short term.” Reuters.com
• 8. Video
• 9. Negative Feedback on Previous Version of the App
• 10. Some Apps Don’t Travel Well ! Wi-Fi is not always readily available ! With typical client-server apps, you can incur additional charges when traveling ! When your connection is slower than my grandfather with ankle weights, some apps can behave erratically
• 11. What Needed To Be Fixed “ We realized that some apps don’t travel well in that when you are abroad, some apps, especially travel apps, don’t perform as well as you like” Paul Sheridan, Senior Software architect, sheridanp@ryanair.com
• 12. Why Did Ryanair Choose Couchbase? ! Ryanair switched to a mobile-first approach ! Couchbase Server + Sync Gateway + Couchbase Lite suited Ryanair’s needs perfectly ! Easy to switch to, because native API’s require almost no learning
• 13. Why Did Ryanair Choose Couchbase? ! Open source – not a black box ! Great technical support – people are actually paid to build it ! Large developer community – 70,000 active developers and growing
• 14. Why Did Ryanair Choose Couchbase? ! Document conflict detection and resolution out-of-the-box ! Easy to control document access via channels ! Querying documents via views
• 15. We Didn’t Have To Implement Our Own Sync ! It’s a tough nut to crack ! Change notifications and conflict resolutions can become very complex, very quickly ! It’s a huge distraction for our already busy developers
• 16. We Didn’t Have To Implement Our Own Sync ! It would delay the projects and would increase development costs ! We don’t have to worry about QA ! I am not very clever; I’m not going to get it right the first time
• 17. We Implemented Smart Caching In a Week ! Implemented in about a week ! Couchbase Lite takes care of all connectivity issues for us ! Drastically improved app response times ! Saved 80 GB mobile-to-network traffic daily ! Example based on our implementation: https://github.com/Ryanair/resource-sync-example
• 18. How Does The Customer Benefit? ! Booking process reduced from 5 minutes to less than 2 minutes ! Less traffic between devices and our servers ! Application is much more responsive ! Users are happier with their experience
• 19. Major Improvements to the Current Version of the App
• 20. What’s Next? ! Recommendation engine ! Personalized Ryanair experience ! Faster flight search ! Continue to simplify every aspect of travel
• 21. Industry Trends & How Couchbase Can Help ! IoT opens new possibilities for Ryanair ! Integration with wearables ! Peer-to-peer can be used during flights ! The user journey should go beyond 
 the mobile/desktop screen
• 22. Questions? Thank you!