Case Study: WestJet achieves faster, more scalable flight scheduling with Neo4j

WestJet Takes Flight with Booking Experience Powered by Neo4j

WestJet, the Canadian airline serving a rapidly expanding network of destinations, needed a better way to manage and display complex flight schedules for travelers. As routes became more seasonal and connection rules grew more intricate, its existing relational database approach could not easily handle the volume of scheduling data and itinerary logic, so WestJet turned to Neo4j for a graph database solution.

Neo4j helped WestJet build a scalable online schedule system that automated route validation and itinerary generation, first with Neo4j Community Edition and then Neo4j Enterprise Edition, later migrating to Neo4j AuraDB on Microsoft Azure. The results were significant: schedule updates became 530% faster, the model that once took nearly six hours to run was cut to about half that time, and WestJet now manages about 500,000 nodes and 5 million relationships to support smoother self-service booking and future growth toward 30 million passengers annually by 2028.

WestJet

Dave Pirie

Delivery Manager for Digital Check-In