In 2019, easyJet holidays was launched, a tour operator targeting the needs of the easyJet generation with an all-new package holiday offering with over 100 great value beach and city destinations across Europe.

Named the UK’s fastest growing travel business in 2022, it has emerged as a key player in the European travel industry, focused on providing complete holiday packages to the 84% of UK leisure travelers seeking a seamless and holistic holiday booking experience. easyJet holidays adopted a forward-thinking greenfield strategy with a modern composable architecture approach to building the new website that would facilitate agility, scalability, and innovation. Since then, its operations have expanded beyond the UK, encompassing Switzerland, France, and Germany.

The Challenge:

easyJet holidays faced the challenge of replacing an existing third-party-managed site that was ill-equipped to handle the anticipated level of site traffic. Opting for a MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, Headless) approach, the company embarked on the journey to construct a new booking site and customer experience, leveraging the promise of scalability and high performance that a composable technology strategy can deliver.

Andrew Binstead, Head of Engineering, emphasized the advantage of starting afresh, stating, "Taking on a MACH architecture allowed us to build up our components quickly and easily, but in a scalable fashion that will enable us to continue to scale well into the future."

The team was required to map out a completely new experience that would best meet the needs of the customer in a way that they could access all the information and services needed to manage their holiday.

MACH Approach:

easyJet holidays initiated its MACH journey as a startup, evolving from a small team to more than ten development teams today, with dedicated roles for product owners, delivery leads, user experience designers, and testers. The team set a stringent six-month deadline for the minimum viable product (MVP) launch, ensuring they incorporated customer insights for a delightful experience while also delivering a most lovable product (MLP) to inspire emotional connections with users.

The company’s primary goal has always been to swiftly deliver value to customers and expedite product launches, and MACH architecture has made this possible from the get go. The flexibility delivered by a composable technology approach enables the team to consistently deliver on almost any idea, providing a holistic view on what can be achieved. And in the rare case when they don’t have the needed capability within the existing systems, the team can consider bringing in new software and functionality with maximum agility. Going composable meant that decisions would be easy to reverse in the future, and improvements could be made without impacting the site’s performance.

Utilising .NET for development on Linux, the MACH stack was meticulously crafted, with the technology dictating much of the approach. The launch day marked the culmination of six months of intense development to ensure they hit the deadline to start selling package holidays for winter 2019 and summer 2020.

Leveraging MACH Technologies:

Automation became a focal point of the MACH approach, with an emphasis on automated testing and a bi-weekly release cycle, with an ambition to release continuously in the future.

“The MACH architecture plays a pivotal role in achieving this goal,” according to Jordy Vernes, Digital Product Owner. “It significantly enables the separation of the front end from the back end, providing us with the capability to encapsulate logic within services. This, in turn, facilitates the automated deployment and testing of these services enhancing our operational speed and ensuring optimal performance.”

Much of the MACH approach to delivering a site like this is already defined by the technology vendors and their approach to building solutions. Choosing the right technology is critical, but once the stack was built, according to the easyJet holidays team, it just worked and flowed in the way it presents itself at the front end.

For easyJet holidays, operating within a MACH architecture significantly fosters innovation in its processes. While they can conceptualise optimal customer journeys and designs, the flexibility of the MACH architecture, particularly its microservices framework, allows them to creatively integrate and deploy elements. This plug-and-play approach empowers them to be more innovative in their development, facilitating quicker routes to market.

According to Andrew, the performance of the MACH-based site has been surprising. “EasyJet is a well known name so as you can imagine we get a lot of site traffic. The end of the year is our peak time, but our set-up means we can scale horizontally as much as we want. We can just keep adding capacity and to date, we’ve not reached a limit.”

The team describes the ability to know its systems can grow in line with business expectations as exciting, given their growth plans including recently launching into new European markets of France, Germany and Switzerland at pace. And, as the quality and quantity of microservices application design increases, they are confident they will always have access to the best and most modern technology on the market, which can be plugged into the architecture simply and quickly without having to always build functionality in house.

Impact:

Customer feedback, a key metric for easyJet holidays, consistently reflects a positive booking experience, with a remarkable 90% NetEasy score - meaning that 90% of customers who booked a holiday found the website easy or extremely easy to use.. The company relies on constant data analysis to gauge website performance and collects insights for continuous improvement.

The success of easyJet holidays is measured through the agility of its development teams and the speed at which new ideas are deployed. The implementation of MACH architecture has proven instrumental for the easyJet team in creating optimal digital customer experiences, allowing the company to stay innovative and agile in its approach.

“There isn’t one measure of success,” says Alex Black, Head of Digital Product. “We look at each individual product around the website to understand the success metric of each, and we’re always optimizing.”

Conclusion:

In summary, Andrew says about easyJet’s composed MACH journey: “A MACH architecture is probably one of the best enablers you can have. It makes life easy in terms of technology. It enables you to change direction quickly and come up with new ideas without having to rethink everything you've previously done. It's not straightforward. It's not necessarily easy. And it does need a change in mindset away from past ways of doing things, but it really enables you to do things quickly and deploy new ideas instantly.”

Case study summary

In this case study, easyJet holidays, part of the easyJet group, strategically embraced a MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, Headless) architecture for its package holiday booking platform. Faced with the challenge of replacing an insufficient third-party-managed site, the company adopted a greenfield approach, constructing an entirely new site and customer experience with a focus on scalability and high performance. Concentrating on automation, bi-weekly releases, and a seamless separation of front-end and back-end, easyJet holidays achieved surprising performance and scalability, even during peak times. The MACH architecture empowered the company to foster innovation, continually improve customer experiences, and swiftly adapt to market demands, resulting in high customer satisfaction and a dynamic, agile development process. Overall, easyJet holidays has found MACH architecture to be a crucial enabler for rapid innovation and success within the competitive travel industry, proven by strong Q1 financial results in 2024 and overall customer satisfaction.