Flying High with a Best-in-Class Commerce Offering

Aerolíneas Argentinas is Argentina's largest airline and was founded in 1950, with more than 12,000 employees, and a gross income of about $2 billion per year (with $700 million from their online platform). Aerolíneas Argentinas has enjoyed success as a leader within the industry.

With the increasing aero-commercial competition in Latin America, including the arrival of worldwide tier-1 airlines, major regional M&As such as Chile and Brazil's flagship airlines, as well as the growth of aggressive low-cost carriers such as Norwegian, Aerolineas Argentinas needed to re-think its business strategy, to transform its B2C commerce capability and to revamp their customer experience in record time.

With our strong local presence, our tested capacity to manage and deliver large complex projects, and our proven track record in the airline industry, Aerolineas Argentinas turned to Valtech for help with this transformation.

Like many companies, Aerolineas Argentinas was looking for major upgrades to its customer experience and commerce platforms. This included the need to re-design and build a whole new website, B2C e-commerce solution and content management system, while developing a new core system and migrating existing pages and apps to a high performance, scalable, microservices technology.

With ambitions to offer a totally reimagined experience for its customers with a frictionless and intuitive commerce offering, Aerolineas Argentinas needed a company that could deliver a next generation platform to serve as a solid foundation for a truly omnichannel physical/digital experience and be part of a strategy where high-value, quick wins are delivered immediately to production.

To provide a better experience and to meet their needs for responsiveness and scalability we worked with the airline to apply a best-in-class technology ecosystem based on composable architectures and MACH (Microservices, API-First, Cloud, Headless) principles. That approach enabled us to deliver a flexible, performant, highly available and easy to maintain platform that would translate into a more intuitive and impactful customer experience.

We also wanted to improve usability for the editorial teams and to make sure the new platform was easy to amend and update, making it as future-proof as possible. One of the main issues Aerolineas Argentinas had with its previous platform was continuous delivery; due to its monolithic nature, every change had an impact in the whole system. By decoupling the front and back ends, and focusing on a solution based on microservices, each of the services can be delivered independently, automatically and without any downtime. That de-coupling process is instrumental in supporting the responsiveness and flexibility of teams, making it possible for them to make data-based changes to the front-end experience without impacting downstream elements.

The new scalable, robust platform allows users to easily search for flights, go through the full booking process, set up their trip options, adding ancillaries, seats or service class upgrades. Customers can also perform exchanges or cancellations smoothly and modify an existing booking. Based on a micro-services platform, the new flexible funnel has sped up the booking process and checkout experience, reducing steps and increasing page response. The impact of these transformations to the commerce functionality and customer experience are evident in the early results from Aerolineas Argentinas.

As well as a 99.9% increase in uptime and service ability, the airline has also experienced a 30% increase in Conversion Rate and a 40% reduction in Bounce Rate since making the recommended changes.

In the latest Hotsale Aerolineas Argentinas sold 180,000 airline tickets and noted 15,000 concurrent users during a key sales event, both indicative of an improved commerce and customer experience.