Case Study: Ryanair achieves seamless high-volume booking performance and marketing agility with Citrix NetScaler

Seamless performance for Ryanair.com

Ryanair, one of Europe’s largest low-cost airlines, relies on Ryanair.com and bookryanair.com for roughly 98–99% of sales, handling about 50 million page views and 1.2 million unique users each day. With five data centres and a small infrastructure team, the company needed to ensure extreme stability and resilience for high daily traffic and frequent, unpredictable spikes (evening bookings and promotions) while enabling rapid marketing-driven URL changes without disrupting deployments.

Ryanair deployed Citrix NetScaler appliances (high‑availability pairs across data centres) using GSLB for load‑balancing and traffic failover, along with custom rewrite/responder rules to implement redirects quickly. The result: seamless handling of record booking days with capacity to spare, zero downtime during updates, marketing redirects that go live in ~20 minutes instead of hours, and the ability to scale service delivery without expanding the web farm.

Ryanair

Declan Costello

Infrastructure and Operations Manager