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It’s official: Airline websites are slow, but they don’t have to be (calibreapp.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/webdev@programming.dev
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Airline websites are slow. 95% of them fail Google’s Core Web Vitals on mobile.

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[–] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

AI article.

From my experience one of the core reasons they are slow is because the backends are still IBM, and every web query needs to be translated a number of times, often web <> java <> IBM/TPF, which is what bottlenecks each request.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 month ago (1 child)

    Could you give an example of what makes this an AI article? If you're referring to the image, that is credited to the Illustrator Jeffrey Phillips.

    As for airline backend infrastructure, I remember attending a great talk from Skyscanner, explaining how airlines were ahead of the curve getting computers but the problem is they haven't kept them modern. That however, is not an excuse for poor front-end performance that the article discusses.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    What was analysed#

    Using Airline Website Speed Benchmark data, I studied 111 of the world’s top airlines — pulling real-user Core Web Vitals (CWV) data from the Chrome UX Report, cross referenced with if they passed Google’s site speed ranking assessment, Skytrax service rankings, and the technology stack behind each site.

    It’s altered or had a couple of passes, but this is pretty boilerplate in LLM research efforts these days.

    The image is fine, the content is over the top detailed and misses the core issue which is the backend.

    The points may be valid that there is room for improvement on the frontend, but the backend can’t be made more responsive without significant backend improvements, which is very risky because some of it literally skipped an entire generation of developers (meaning the ones who retired making this, didn’t hand off knowledge to the next generation).

    You heard right on that conference, they were first and then they fell asleep at the wheel.

    Transport and waypoint routing is one of the most challenging processes to get right in software.

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