Iberia Express: building better customer experiences with cloud technology

“We don’t see our passengers as flyers, we see them as clients. We want to get to know them, so we can provide them with a better, more personalized service.”

 Juan Carlos Llorente, Development and Commercial Systems Manager at Iberia Express, is talking about the distinction the airline makes in the way it perceives its customers, and how that is helping to guide the company in the next stage of its development.

 “The low-cost air travel market is extremely competitive, so you have to stand out,” Llorente explains. “That’s why having our own e-commerce platform is so important. It allows us to compete with the rest of the airlines in the market, but through our own channel instead of leaving our flights to be sold elsewhere.

 “It allows us to be a company that provides personalized services to clients, not just operations.”

 For Iberia Express, the continued evolution of its e-commerce platform is critical to the success of the airline moving forward. Because air travel moves fast, and staying on the front foot in a crowded, constantly evolving market requires the ability to pivot and adapt at will. 

 Having already moved to Azure in search of greater flexibility in 2014, the team at Iberia Express has more recently been embracing a raft of new Microsoft technologies that use data to unlock the true power of its e-commerce site. It is helping to ensure that the airline continues to thrive in a crowded marketplace, now and in the future.

A new company with a strong legacy

Iberia Express is an offshoot of Iberia airlines, one of Spain’s largest and most successful airlines. Formed in 2012, Iberia Express was created to focus on the low-cost market. In the nine years since its formation, the airline has grown exponentially, now serving as one of the five main operators out of Madrid airport.

 “We are the number one airline between Madrid and the Canary Islands,” says Antonio Muñoz, Chief Information Officer at Iberia Express. “We have around 700 employees. And around 39 million people have traveled with Iberia Express since the creation of the company”.

 “We started from scratch in 2012“, he adds. “As a new company with its own vision, but working closely with Iberia too, so we inherited some of their ways of doing things.”

 The team at Iberia Express established a successful partnership with Microsoft partner VISEO, which has been an integral part of the team at the airline company ever since. “We are a small team at Iberia Express, like a little family,” says Muñoz. “And we consider VISEO part of this family too.”

 “When we started this adventure with Iberia Express, the challenge was to bring more users to the e-commerce site,” says Agustín Hernández, Manager at VISEO. “At that time, they were selling about 150 tickets per day on the site. One year later, we were selling about 1,500 tickets per day.”

 “The previous site wasn't equipped to support that amount of traffic,” he adds. “So we choose Azure due to the scalability at that time. But also, because we are always very confident about the flexibility of Microsoft technology. It was the best choice for us.”

Creating a more personalized and secure customer experience

When the company started developing its e-commerce platform, the main focus was to establish a base of clients that Iberia Express could engage with in an accurate and personalized way. Data has always played an essential role in achieving that. But the latest Azure technologies are helping to unlock more and more capabilities on the platform.

 “Data is the critical factor in helping us to gain insights that create better experiences for our clients,” Says Llorente. 

 “Technologies like Azure Machine Learning Studio and Azure Databricks allow us to analyze the behaviors of different customers, in general terms or in particular terms, and make sure that we provide relevant offers to specific clients or a group of clients. We can evaluate how to price an item in a way that will be more visible for a particular client.”

 “It helps us make a much more personalized experience,” he adds. “That was one of the key goals for the e-commerce platform: to be able to extract data and make a more personalized experience for the client. To make the journey specific and relevant.”

 Another key goal was to make the platform more secure and resilient to the activities of cybercriminals. “We had a significant issue with fraudulent purchases on the site before,” says Llorente. “But since implementing the new architecture, such instances have decreased dramatically. The difference is night and day,” he adds. 

Evolving the core architecture of the platform

Unlocking these and other benefits on the platform has required the company to evolve the architecture underpinning its e-commerce site over time.

 “If you look at our e-commerce site in 2021, it has evolved dramatically since it was first built in 2014,” says Muñoz. “We have made a lot of improvements, and we’re keen to adopt new technologies that can improve our service. 

 “VISEO play a key role in this aspect,” he continues. “They are like our eyes on new trends; they see the technologies they think will bring value, and open new opportunities for us.”

 One of those improvements is the use of Azure Databricks as a key layer in the new architecture. “Azure Databricks is the core of everything,” says Norberto Castillo, Senior Data Engineer for the IT department at Iberia Express. “And we're using the Azure Data Lake as a repository for the Databricks engine in the bottom layer. Which means we’re capable of storing a huge amount of data in a very cost-efficient way, which wasn’t possible before.” 

 The platform also uses fully managed NoSQL database service Azure Cosmos DB to minimize response times, while ensuring 99.999 percent availability, and automatic and instant scalability. And an additional layer of Power BI, which allowing the team at Iberia Express to monitor the main KPIs they want to track about the e-commerce platform, while providing a user-friendly interface for business users.

 It is an architectural foundation designed to allow the company to continue to add new technologies and innovations to its repertoire as it grows. 

Putting customers at the center of the company’s future

In keeping with their desire to embrace the latest cloud-based technologies, the team at Iberia Express is not content to stand still. They want to get even closer to their clients now.

 “We need to think in an even more customer-oriented way,” says Muñoz. “We want to be able to present customers with things they are really interested in. I think there is great scope to take personalization a step further. For instance, email campaigns about specific flight routes that clients regularly use.”

 The team also see the potential for technology to help them navigate a future in which people are starting to travel more freely again, after a significant hiatus.

 “In the post-pandemic environment, our clients want a contactless experience during the payment process,” he adds. “That is something we are already trying to change today and we have more plans to change these legacy processes going forward.

 “So the future is really exciting in terms of opportunities and challenges. And we would like to use Microsoft technologies to support us. The technology is there. We just need to put it in place and use it wisely.”