LOT Polish Airlines Case Study

LOT Polish Airlines connects New Europe with the world. It provides nearly five million passengers a year with travel options to more than 40 destinations worldwide via Warsaw. As the only carrier in the region, LOT offers direct long-haul flights to the United States, Canada, and China, while building its leadership position in East Central Europe. It flies one of the youngest fleets in Europe and operates the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, one of the world's most advanced aircraft, on all long-haul connections. With 86 years of experience, LOT is also one of the oldest airlines in the world and an internationally recognized Polish brand that has received numerous awards from industry organizations and media.

In 2014 LOT was looking to create a mobile solution for its customers. The company wanted to allow travelers to book tickets from anywhere and have easy access to travel information through an intuitive interface on devices like smartphones and tablets. LOT needed a solution that could to respond to the needs of a growing number of customers with connected devices who expect continuous connectivity. “We wanted information about our offers and promotions to be easily accessible to anyone, always and everywhere, with the use of mobile devices,” says Arkadiusz Gawryluk, e-commerce manager at LOT Polish Airlines. “We were guided by the principle, ‘anytime, anywhere.’ We needed solution that could give us worldwide availability and required scalability.”

LOT decided to develop and implement its new mobile solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to leverage the benefits of the cloud for application creation, deployment, and management. During the selection phase, the most important factors were full scalability, which is critical during ticket-price promotions when website and application traffic tends to grow by orders of magnitude. It also needed worldwide availability to serve large numbers of customers in Europe, North America, and Asia.

LOT’s new mobile solution was implemented in cooperation with Poland-based AMG.net S.A., a provider of solutions for customer-service and web-portal projects in the telecom, financial, energy, industrial, and public sectors.

LOT’s solution uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for web front-end, integration, business logic services, and a content management solution. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is used for flight network search engine, profiles, promotions, and booking data, while Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is used to store front end content and backup solutions. The company uses Amazon ElastiCache for front end and database cache implementation; Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for cross-region data replication; Amazon Route 53 DNS service for latency-based geographical user routing; and Amazon CloudFront for fast provisioning of cached and dynamic content. Amazon CloudWatch provides monitoring functionality. The entire infrastructure and software setup was designed around lightweight, reusable services that are exposed to both web front-end and mobile web-service clients.

LOT’s mobile solution offers its customers streamlined access to information and a better travel experience. All of the airline’s services and offers are available to customers through their mobile devices via the LOT mobile website and the app, LOT Mobile for IOS and Android. Passengers can check flight schedules, see special offers, buy tickets, and check in for flights in a user-friendly interface on their smartphone or tablet. Useful travelers’ information, like the free luggage limit for a given flight, is also available via the mobile application. Every month customers from more than 60 countries use the application.

“This solution offers many benefits to our passengers. Now, at any time and any place, they can plan their journey, book their ticket, and check the status of their flight—all quickly and easily, regardless of how many other customers are doing these things at the same time. This application helped LOT increase tickets sales and improved customer satisfaction,” says Krzysztof Jarosz, director of IT at LOT. “With the use of new technologies, we've optimized IT maintenance costs and gained the flexibility to create new functionality and a new offer for our customers.”

Working with integration partner AMG.net made the journey to the cloud fast and smooth for LOT. The design, creation, and deployment of the application took about six months. With cloud infrastructure and services from AWS, LOT’s mobile site is fast and reliable, regardless of the quantity or location of users. Another benefit of building mobile solutions on the AWS cloud is that the airline is empowered to expand e-commerce and mobile services. It plans to introduce more traveler-friendly functionality, like mobile notifications for trip details, reminders, and personalized special offers.