WARP 2063E Application Pre-Processor Case Study
AMP Recovers 90% of WAN Traffic and Achieves an Average 1 Second Reponse Time

About Holiday Autos

Holiday Autos is the world’s largest leisure car rental broker, offering low cost car rentals at over 4000 locations in 40 countries worldwide. They also serve as a broker to partners such as High Street Travel Agents, but the majority of their business today is acquired directly from consumers via the web and their call centre.

Holiday Autos had been operating successfully as a call centre for morethan 16 years; 4 years ago, they recognized the web as the key to achieving wider market penetration, and began the process of web-enabling their core business. At that time, 90% of their business was transacted through the call centre. Today, call centre operations have become secondary to the web, which now delivers more than 70% or their business, and is increasing. As a result, much of Holiday Auto’s call centre support is now targeted at consumers lacking Internet access. The 160-agent call center in Camberley also supports after-sales services, such as rental extensions, upgrades, and cancellations.

The Challenge

The most significant challenge at Holiday Autos has been the complex task of managing and consolidating their IT platforms while continuing to serve consumer demand on their existing web applications infrastructure. Holiday Autos approached Warp in order to find a solution which could reduce the load on the firm’s back-end booking engine, as well as increase overall performance for their call centre operators. Call centre staff access the booking engine via a web-based application. Prior to installing Warp, Holiday Autos’ web servers were routinely running at 100% capacity, and frequent outages were causing problems in maintaining adequate service levels. These conditions were exacerbated during seasonal peaks in the summer months, and during the promotional period after the Christmas and New Year holiday season.

The Warp Solution

By installing two Warp appliances (allowing for resilience) in front of the Holiday Autos web servers, a high proportion of requests are now fulfilled without accessing the back-end server application.

  • Web server utilisation has been reduced by 50%
  • Average response time has been slashed to 10% of its former value.
  • Average call times have been reduced from 3 minutes to 2 minutes
  • Call throughput has been increased by more than 30%.

This represents a significant savings for Holiday Autos’ call centre operator staffi ng requirements, amounting to nearly £1 million per year. Existing staff can now handle work that would otherwise have required 50 additional operators. And the improved responsiveness of the system has improved staff morale significantly.

Holiday Autos was also delighted to find that the reliability of the application increased signifi cantly as the load on the web servers decreased and peak demand spikes were handled without service deterioration.

Platform consolidation and technology standardization is a key aim in Holiday Autos’ IT strategy. Reducing the load on the booking engine frees up capacity, allowing it to take on processing for new systems as Holiday Autos acquires new business and franchises.

Moving forward, Warp Solutions’ open-platform software solution will support Holiday Autos’ end-to-end integration strategy and will ease the deployment and managment of edge nodes at their remote locations.