View from the top: easyJet web manager Simon Pritchard

Low-cost airlines have, for the most part, bucked the airline industry's malaise in the past couple of years. They are remaining profitable and expanding fleets while others have shed jobs and costs just to remain in the air.

easyJet, one of the sector's leaders, continues to grow: last year it spent £374m to buy its rival Go, raising revenues and expanding its routes.

This acquisition, along with heavy marketing and promotion, increased the company's January passenger count by 43.5 per cent to nearly 1.5 million, up from just over a million last year.

A large part of the airline's success lies with its online reservation system, which helps to keep seats full and costs low.

Nearly 95 per cent of its bookings are handled over the internet.

'easyJet.com is the core of our business,' said Simon Pritchard, the web manager responsible for the airline's entire online presence.

When easyJet bought Go, Pritchard's attention was focused on rapidly integrating the two different IT systems and making it easy for Go's customers to buy their tickets online without any confusion or service disruption.

'We completed the primary task in December, merging Go's routes into easyJet.com and linking that with our central reservation system,' said Pritchard.

The site is available 24/7 and is more efficient to book through than the call centre, but easyJet also uses a variety of tactics to convince as many customers as possible to book through the web.

'It's easy to see that online fares are all discounted over fares bought through our call centre. Aside from this, we run a number of deals that are exclusively available online and also provide online-only access to a number of routes,' said Pritchard.

This technique is particularly effective when EasyJet releases its latest schedules.

'Twice a year, we advise our registered customers via email that our latest flight timetable has been opened up for the next six months, which is an extremely powerful tool for driving people online,' he said.

From a technology perspective, these two releases also provide the website's peak traffic times.

'During these peaks, we have encountered sustained sales rates of up to five seats per second,' said Pritchard.

Calculated out, this can mean up to 18,000 reservations being pushed through the system in a single hour. Ensuring that the site can handle this load is another one of Pritchard's responsibilities.

'We have 16 web servers, which are hosted in two geographically separate web farms and managed by two competing hosting providers. A load-balancing tool automatically manages the flow of traffic between the two sites,' he said.

'This approach is not only effective in ensuring that the site remains constantly available, no matter what happens, but it also promotes some healthy competition between the two providers.'

The results speak for themselves: the site has not had a single failure, successfully surviving various small catastrophes like a complete server failure and a fire.

The web hasn't only been useful for retaining customers: 'Web technology, including intranet-based feedback forums, has been instrumental in our internal communications, which has helped smooth the acquisition and assist staff at both companies work through the change,' added Pritchard.

Now that the acquisition is completed and all systems are operational, Pritchard's attention is focused on the future.

During 2003, he hopes to push increasing amounts of functionality and services through easyJet.com and provide customers with more self-service options to continue reducing call centre demand.

One of the technologies that is helping him do this is Microsoft's .Net.

'We are busy researching .Net as a new platform for developing new products and web services,' said Pritchard.

'We found ASP [Active Server Page] very limiting, but .Net is looking to be greatly improved, especially for web development.'

The airline is pretty much a Microsoft shop through and through: 'We use core Microsoft technologies wherever possible. It's well integrated, well supported and allows us to focus on a single skill set.'

easyJet.com is currently based on a Windows 2000 platform, with XML-based data fed into a SQL Server database.

Pritchard believes that .Net will improve the performance, reliability and development time of various web applications used by the company, which ties into his goals for the year ahead.

'We're constantly thinking about how we can improve and expand the easyJet.com platform and what other products we can use to help drive more customers online.'

One possibility is merging hotel reservations into the flight booking engine, although Pritchard is quick to point out that this is just one of many ideas being considered internally.