Case Study: WOW air achieves scalable, reliable booking capacity for U.S. launch with Amazon Web Services

WOW air - Customer Case Study

WOW air is an Icelandic low-cost carrier founded in 2011 that sells à‑la‑carte transatlantic travel. Rapid growth and sales campaigns repeatedly overwhelmed its on‑premises VMware servers in Reykjavík and a collocated data center, threatening major launches (including new U.S. routes) and forcing the team to plan a 12× capacity expansion to handle expected traffic spikes.

WOW air migrated its Internet booking engine and web services to AWS (using EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, RDS, Route 53, S3, and IAM), enabling elastic scaling and far better uptime. The move supported 15–30× peak loads, cut application latency (about 170 ms to 55 ms), reduced deployment time to minutes, lowered management overhead to a one–two‑person job, and saved an estimated $30,000–$45,000—making the U.S. sales campaign and future growth feasible.

Wow Air

Kristjan Thorvaldsson

CTO