Case Study: Lonely Planet achieves 70% cache hit rate and faster personalized pages with Fastly

Lonely Planet - Customer Case Study

Lonely Planet, the world’s leading travel publisher with more than 500 titles and about 10 million monthly website visitors, needed a CDN that would act as an extension of their app and fit their development workflow. Their challenge was to gain self‑provisioning, granular edge control for dynamic content (like country- and currency‑specific shop pages), real‑time performance visibility, and proactive support—capabilities their prior providers didn’t provide.

Fastly provided custom VCL, an API/control panel for instant self‑service, real‑time analytics, and responsive support, allowing Lonely Planet to move application logic to the edge, set country/currency cookies, and cache multiple page variants. As a result, cache-hit ratio rose from about 20% to 70%, origin load dropped substantially, and personalized page load times improved while giving the team greater operational control.

Lonely Planet

Mark Jennings

Director of Technical Operations