Umbraco
Case Study

Scaling up flyadeal’s productivity and page views with Umbraco Heartcore

flyadeal, a Saudi Arabian airline, was looking for a headless, cloud-based solution to allow them to efficiently ship the same content across their multiple platforms. Enter Umbraco Heartcore: a headless solution that allowed flyadeal to have their promotions up and running within a few hours across mobile and web - and achieve a stunning 20% increase in page views.

Key results

19.51%
increase in page views
16.32%
increase in views per user
5.13%
increase in engagement time

flyadeal, a low-cost airline in Saudi Arabia, had a goal for their next platform: 

Instead of creating and managing multiple content management systems, they wanted to use the same content across their multiple websites and apps under their e-commerce ecosystem - all handled through a single CMS.

So in 2023, they initiated a next-generation, e-commerce platform project.

The team was already using Umbraco, but for their new project, they were looking for a headless, cloud-based solution that could be unified seamlessly across different platforms. 

A screenshot of an airline booking website in Arabic, prominently featuring the brand 'flyadeal' in its header. The interface includes a flight search panel with options for round trip or one-way travel, destination selection, and dates. A smiling man in a white shirt and glasses appears on the right, with purple airplane seats in the background, giving a customer-friendly vibe. The site's color scheme is bright yellow and purple.


Looking for great usability for business and technical teams alike

flyadeal was evaluating software providers based on four additional parameters: ease of coding and use, scalability, support, and cost.

Ultimately, the team chose Umbraco Heartcore for its ease of development and usability which allows them to significantly decrease their time to market.

A mobile screen capture of the 'flyadeal' airline's app displaying upcoming flight itineraries. The first flight, F3 152, is scheduled from Jeddah to Riyadh on March 3, 2024, marked as 'ON TIME' with a departure at 00:20 and a 1h 35m duration. The second flight, F3 616, from Cairo to Riyadh on March 4, 2024, also shows as 'ON TIME', leaving at 22:40 and taking 2h 30m. There are 'Check-in' prompts for both flights. The app's interface is in purple and yellow, the airline's colors.
A mobile app confirmation screen in Arabic from 'flyadeal' with a vibrant purple background and yellow accents. It features an illustrated ticket with a checkmark, surrounded by stars, indicating a successful action, possibly a check-in. Arabic text on the screen conveys a message about the successful completion of a step in the travel process, such as flight check-in or booking confirmation. The interface includes a button for accessing the boarding pass and another for travel information.
A mobile app screen from 'flyadeal' for adding travel documents. The interface is in English with fields for document type, which is pre-selected as 'Passport', date of birth with a Hijri calendar option, document number, issuing country defaulted to Saudi Arabia, and expiration date also with a Hijri calendar option. A toggle switch at the bottom offers to make this the default travel document. There's also a 'Scan Passport' button for easy data entry.

With some of the other headless CMS options, flyadeal saw a complexity that needed the day-to-day involvement of senior development resources. On the contrary, they found Umbraco Heartcore to be easy to use and adaptive for both the development teams and the business e-commerce teams. 

If we want to launch a promotion and all the creatives are lined up, the business team knows how to run the promo widgets on different pages, and they aren’t dependent on technical resources. This lack of complexity is what brings Umbraco ahead. When the business teams can do their job with ease and the technical teams can work on development in parallel, your time to market is extremely reduced. And that was the most important thing for us.

Surya Kuchibotla​​​​, Head of eCommerce and Distribution

The onboarding process with Umbraco was smooth, and the flyadeal teams involved in the project received the necessary support and education to be able to use the entire product to the fullest. Umbraco Heartcore also fulfilled flyadeal’s compliance requirements.

Post-launch productivity and user engagement 

Within 90 days, flyadeal’s new platform was fully implemented.

Their new platform now allows them to step away from running multiple content management systems for all their digital channels, having to manually update each. 

Instead, they can easily scale the same content across multiple widgets on both web and mobile. 

A screenshot of the 'flyadeal' airline's website flight modification page. The interface displays an upcoming flight from Jeddah (JED) to Riyadh (RUH) on the 22nd of March 2024, departing at 05:00 and arriving at 06:35, with a duration of 1 hour and 35 minutes. On the right side, there are promotional images offering flight deals to Amman and Cairo with starting prices in Saudi Riyals (SAR). The website's color theme is purple and yellow, aligning with the brand's colors.
A flight selection interface from the 'flyadeal' airline website for flights from Jeddah to Abha on March 15, 2024. The page lists available flights with departure times and prices in Saudi Riyals (SAR). Options include a flight departing at 03:55 and another at 05:10, both with a duration of 1 hour and 15 minutes. The site's layout is clean with a purple header, a search module, and options to sort flights by earliest departure. Prices for this specific date are highlighted at SAR 209.00.

The solution improved flyadeal’s efficiency, decreased dependency on development teams, and reduced time to market for promotions. They are now up and running within a few hours, allowing the team to be more productive and run more promotions than ever before.

The new solution benefited the customers, as well. The load time on their web pages has been reduced,  resulting in increased user engagement: page views were up by 19.51%, the number of views per user increased by 16.32%, and overall, the engagement time went up by 5.13%.

The transition between pages is more friction-free and the load time is light. After switching to Umbraco Heartcore, we have seen technological improvements as well as usability improvements.

Mohannad Alsalmi, Chief Information Officer