easyJet - Prepare major systems for peak to support the sale of 800+ seats per minute

Situation

easyJet is Europe’s leading airline offering a unique and winning combination of the best route network connecting Europe's primary airports, with great value fares and friendly service.

easyJet flies on more of Europe’s most popular routes than any other airline. easyJet carries over 80 million passengers annually, of which more than 12 million are travelling on business. easyJet flies over 270 aircraft on more than 880 routes to over 140 airports across 31 countries. More than 300 million Europeans live within one hour's drive of an easyJet airport.

“We have partnered with Capacitas since 2004. Over this period, together we have scaled key commercial and operations systems to deliver extraordinary business growth and successfully navigated our peak sales periods” 

Craig Donald, Head of Operations Systems at easyJet

Challenges

easyJet IT have 5 ongoing challenges:

1. Business growth
2. easyJet operate in a highly competitive market; there is constant business change which in turn drives technology change
3. Requirement to maintain easyJet's cost advantage
4. Requirement to maintain digital platforms as a key point of differentiation
5. Major business peaks around online flight booking, summer operations and crew leave

Our Intervention

Capacitas has been working with easyJet since 2004.

We help them to address these challenges through the following interventions:

• Ensuring major systems can scale for business growth
• Management of performance risk of major technology change programmes
• Qualification of IT capacity investment
• Prepare major systems for peak

“Capacitas have helped us to de-risk major technology transformation programmes and ensure our spend in IT capacity is optimised.”

Adrian Ball, Head of Commercial Systems at easyJet

Benefits

We have worked collaboratively with easyJet's IT teams to deliver the following benefits:

• Scaled key systems to enable a 18% compound annual growth rate in passengers 
• Ensuring key operations and commercial systems continue to meet availability target.
• Delivered major technology programmes across e-commerce platform, crew portal, airline operations and flight planning platforms
• Optimised a key system in order to defer a capex investment.
• Maintained the strength of the digital platform.
  • This was demonstrated when the summer season tickets went on sale. On the day easyJet were commanding 33% of all UK airline web traffic share.
  • In the early moments they were selling 800 seats per minute, rising to a peak when we were selling out the equivalent of an A320 Airbus every seven seconds

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