Client Case Studies: Cheapflights


The Challenge:

Launched in 1996, Cheapflights (www.cheapflights.co.uk) has been serving the travel industry ever since the company pioneered travel on the internet in the UK. Today, Cheapflights.co.uk is a top ten UK travel website, the UK’s largest independent travel portal, and a one-stop-shop for customers seeking best travel deals. In January 2004, Cheapflights have recorded 6 million unique site visitors.

“We looked at five different hosting providers and found that they didn’t meet the criteria we were looking for. Most ISPs talk about robust infrastructures, but very few have power and cooling capabilities that live up to their sales literature. Globix genuinely did. We found that Globix’s offering actually matched up to what they were saying. Because our target audience is spread across all geographics, peering is absolutely critical. We judged that Globix had one of the best peering networks in the market,” says Cheapflights CIO/CTO Peter Walker.

“Continuous, round-the-clock, non-stop Internet service is our number one priority. We rely on our customers’ patronage and if our site experiences an outage for whatever reason, our customers would be forced to switch to another travel website or back to the old, traditional media, possibly never to return.”

“An outage would also impact the successful relationships we enjoy with our advertisers. Www.cheapflights.co.uk accrues revenues from advertisers as our customers are referred to their sites. Outages are therefore not an option for us,” says Peter Walker.


The Solution:

The full service complex hosting solution Globix proposed included dual 100 mbps network handoffs, giving Cheapflights the ability to handle peak traffic at busy times without impacting the customer experience whatsoever. This was critical to Cheapflights as they experience a lot of seasonal traffic.

“Over the three years I have been working with Globix, I am pleased to say we have never experienced an outage. Even through the London blackout we didn’t experience any problems. We believe that one of the keys to this reliable service is that we are still working with the same people we started with at Globix. Retaining the same relationships over three years is extremely rare in this industry,” says Wai-Wah Tang, Cheapflights IS Manager.