Case Study: Scoot Airlines achieves 80% faster site speed and reduced look-to-book ratio with Distil Networks

Scoot Airlines increases site speed by 80%, reduces look-to-book ratio, and safeguards passenger-facing systems with Distil Networks

Scoot, the low-cost arm of Singapore Airlines, faced repeated spikes of sophisticated bot traffic that degraded site performance by 50–80%, abused its booking engine (skewing the look-to-book ratio), slowed passenger-facing systems like check-in, and drove customer complaints and extra staff hours. Unauthorized OTAs and scrapers were even accessing Scoot’s API via partners, and manual IP blocking proved ineffective against rotating proxies and increasingly intelligent bots.

Scoot deployed Distil Networks in an AWS private cloud in under two weeks; Distil’s machine learning and analyst-managed service blocked about 30% more bad bots than competing solutions and stopped API and scraping abuse. The outcome was an ~80% improvement in response times, fewer customer complaints, reduced look-to-book abuse and lower operational overhead — with plans to extend protection to mobile APIs and account‑takeover defenses.

Scoot

Jason Chin

Vice President of IT