Case study · Performance & speed
Faster pages. Faster fares.
Using AI-assisted analysis, Lighthouse and Firebase app data to find where an airline’s website and app were slow, and to improve speed from the booking engine to the CDN.
EmploymentLow-cost airline ecommerceMiddle East
The challenge
Slow pages
lose bookings.
A major Middle East low-cost carrier sold most of its tickets through its own website and app. Both depended on a chain of systems:
- a Navitaire New Skies reservation system
- an Umbraco content management system
- a content delivery network
- Cloudflare in front
When pages or fares loaded slowly, customers left, and it was rarely obvious which part of the chain was responsible.
Ross led this work as the airline’s Senior Manager eCommerce. He combined AI-assisted analysis of web performance audits with performance data from the app to find the real bottlenecks.
The approach
Measure everything.
Fix what matters.
Speed problems on an airline site rarely have one cause. The front end, the CMS, the CDN and the reservation system all add delay.
Use AI to find the patterns.
Run Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals audits across key templates and use AI-assisted analysis to group the issues, explain their causes and suggest fixes faster than manual review.
Look inside the app.
Use Firebase performance data to time each API call in the mobile app and identify which requests to the booking engine were slow, failing or repeated.
Trace delays to their source.
Separate delays in the Navitaire New Skies connection from those in the Umbraco content layer, the content network and Cloudflare caching.
Prioritise by revenue.
Rank fixes by their effect on the search-to-booking journey, deliver them with the teams and vendors involved, then re-measure.
What changed
A quicker path from search to booking.
The airline gained a clear picture of where time was lost, and faster pages and API responses where it mattered most.
Faster key pages
Improved Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals results on the templates that drive bookings.
Fewer slow API calls
Firebase data showed which calls to the booking engine needed attention, and the improvements were measured afterwards.
Shared evidence
Engineering, vendors and commercial teams worked from the same performance data.
This was employment at the airline, not Alpha Digital Group client work. The airline is not named.
Ross’s role
Employment
As Senior Manager eCommerce (employment), Ross led the investigation, worked with the airline’s digital, engineering and vendor teams, and prioritised fixes by their likely effect on bookings.
Published October 2026 · By Ross Brannigan
A potential collaboration
Make your booking path faster.
For airlines and travel retailers on Navitaire, headless CMS or CDN setups where speed problems sit between several systems.
- A performance audit of web and app, from browser to booking engine.
- A prioritised fix list, ranked by booking impact.
- Monitoring dashboards to keep speed from slipping back.
Related case studies
More from the work.
- More partners. More bookings.Growing an airline’s sales through metasearch partners such as Kayak, by improving fare feeds, landing pages and how partner traffic was measured.Read the case study
- Less spend. Same speed.Caching a large travel site at the Cloudflare edge, filtering bot traffic and shrinking builds, after hosting costs led the provider to suspend the project.Read the case study