East West Travel Cut Cloud Costs 40%

onefly (an East West Travel entity) is a leading global plane-ticket technology platform that connects more than 100 airlines with major online travel agencies through a deeply integrated API and 24/7 after-sales support. As the company expanded into new regions and accelerated automation, it struggled with high egress fees, inconsistent latency, and the operational strain of handling massive cross-border traffic surges. By migrating to Akamai Cloud, East West Travel gained the scale, distribution, and price-performance it needed to deliver fast, reliable ticket search and booking services to customers worldwide.

For East West Travel, global reach is the cornerstone of its business. The company aggregates real-time flight inventory, booking, ticketing, and after-sales services for travel platforms around the world. Doing so reliably via its deeply integrated systems and API demands always-on availability and consistently low latency.

“Providing global customers with local service, rapid response times, and high concurrent processing is only possible with large-scale distributed cloud infrastructure,” explained Ethan Pei, Head of Infrastructure for East West Travel.

As the travel industry raced toward automation and smart technology adoption, East West Travel intensified its investment in engineering efficiency and international expansion. But its previous cloud providers couldn’t keep pace with the requirements of a highly concurrent, globalized platform.

High availability and low latency across continents were nonnegotiable. Yet its providers’ soaring outbound bandwidth fees associated with data synchronization and API requests were eroding margins and slowing innovation.

Traffic surges across time zones, unpredictable concurrency spikes, and the need for cross-region scheduling further strained infrastructure. Many travel technology companies had already been pushed out of the market due to such issues.

“The cost of exchanging data across regions was becoming a real competitive threat,” said Pei. “We had to find a provider that could balance performance with cost, not just optimize for one or the other.”

“Our partners span every region,” he continued. “To support them, we needed a provider with truly global coverage, competitive bandwidth pricing, and a billing model that suited our global business.”

According to Pei, Akamai felt like a natural fit. Akamai’s globally distributed infrastructure and edge networking heritage matched East West Travel’s footprint and concurrency demands.

“Its edge distribution solved our latency and cost issues at the source. Plus, its price-performance ratio was one of the strongest we found across the entire industry.”

East West Travel adopted core Akamai cloud computing solutions, including:

• Essential Compute: High-performance virtual machines with predictable price-performance
• Cloud Firewall: Distributed security controls to reduce risk and protect global workloads
• DNS Manager: Highly available, low-latency DNS resolution at the edge
• NodeBalancers: Load balancing across regions for optimized concurrency and resilience
• Private Networking: Secure, high-throughput traffic across regions with reduced egress costs

Implementation was swift. “Akamai’s APIs and tooling lined up beautifully with our existing architecture,” said Pei. “Migration was far easier than we expected.”

Using Akamai Cloud, East West Travel now runs its global ticket-search and booking operations on infrastructure purpose-built for scale, concurrency, and distributed workloads. The results were immediate and measurable.

In addition to reducing its cloud costs 40%, East West Travel maintained 99.95% availability. Significantly lower cloud egress bandwidth fees combined with lower latency enabled more cost-effective, scalable data analysis.

With optimized cloud spend, improved performance, and faster booking flows, East West Travel gained both a strategic and operational advantage. “Our customers now enjoy faster, more stable ticket checking and booking experiences,” said Pei. “And cost optimization gave us a competitive edge.”

The company can now reinvest savings into innovation, automation, and global expansion to strengthen its position in a rapidly evolving and highly competitive market.

Akamai’s responsiveness quickly set the partnership apart. When East West Travel needed to build a custom high-availability architecture across more regions, it faced unusually high complexity.

“The same day we contacted Akamai about our issue, it delivered a precise technical solution. We were astounded that a global leader responded that quickly,” said Pei.

This level of collaboration helped East West Travel improve resilience and reliability across critical services.

As East West Travel continues expanding overseas, Akamai’s roadmap aligns tightly with its ambitions to become the best-value, most trusted tech platform and resource for plane tickets.

“We plan to continuously innovate while optimizing operational efficiency. With Akamai as our partner, we can achieve that,” concluded Pei.