”

“
This app makes it easier for our Customer
Hosts to deliver a customer service experience
that people will remember by providing clear,
accurate information in a timely manner. In
the future we see having a whole new world of
upselling with more people walking the floor
offering services to customers.
”
highlights
—Christopher Davies, Project Manager, easyJet
Enabled Customer Hosts to provide
customers with clear, accurate, and
timely information about flights,
delays, and more.
Created a differentiated customer
service experience from the moment a
customer sees an easyJet representative.
Supported rapid release cycles across
multiple platforms to keep the user
experience up-to-date and release new
functionality to market quickly on any device.
Created a foundation for future
innovation in mobile apps to make
easyJet even more successful.

About
easyJet is one of Europe’s leading airlines, operating on over 600 routes across
more than 30 countries with a fleet of over 200 Airbus aircraft. The company
employs over 8,000 people, including more than 2,000 pilots and 4,500 cabin
crew. In 2014, easyJet flew more than 60 million passengers, and over 300
million people are within a one hour drive of an easyJet airport.
In the competitive world of air travel, the customer experience is key, and
easyJet prides itself on providing a simple, streamlined end-to-end process.
This is especially important at the baggage drop, where the easyJet Customer
Host helps passengers start their journey. “98% of our bookings are online,
and 95% of our passengers check in online,” says Chris Davies, Project
Manager at easyJet, “so the Customer Host is the first person a passenger
sees. They provide our customers with important information, such as flight
locations and the existence and causes of delays.”
Creating an app to support great service
Customer Hosts are the face of easyJet, so in order to improve their ability
to provide passengers with the information and services they need, easyJet
decided to develop a mobile app called Customer Host Assist. “Using
a mobile device, Customer Host Assist helps Customer Hosts provide
information about bookings, find out the timing and causes of delays, and sell
additional services.”
In order to create the application, easyJet hired Xamarin partner EPAM to
handle development. EPAM put together a team of three developers and in
just two months created a proof of concept version of the app that is
now being tested in several airports.

Cross-platform code sharing drives
choice of development platform
easyJet wanted apps that could span
platforms and support its current bring-yourown-device
(BYOD) environment, where
workers select mobile devices from different
platforms depending on their preferences.
In order to achieve this at a reasonable cost
while maintaining rapid release cycles and
improvements, easyJet decided to take EPAM’s
suggestion that the project be built using
Xamarin.
EPAM estimates that up to 60% of the app’s
code will be shared across iOS and Android.
“We have a lot of business logic that can be
shared,” says Ivan Kirkorau, Solutions Architect,
EPAM. The entire idea from the outset was to
have a cross-platform app, and the easyJet
team didn’t want to invest in writing and
maintaining three separate apps when they
could have one codebase for all three. This also
allows them to release more frequently because
updates to the code don’t have to be replicated
three times in different languages.
The app has a Microsoft Azure backend and
makes use of a portable class library that
enables the company to share code across
desktop and mobile applications. Xamarin
Insights is used to catch exceptions during
development.
Kirkorau enthusiastically recommends Xamarin.
“Xamarin enables .NET developers to work
on interesting mobile projects and use new
technologies without having to learn a new
language. In fact, sometimes Xamarin actually
delivers better results than native development.”
Maryia Shalimava, Project Manager at EPAM
adds, “From a business perspective, Xamarin
gives you much more flexibility to extend
your applications.”
“
Xamarin enables .NET developers to work
on interesting mobile projects and use new
technologies without having to learn a new
language. In fact, sometimes Xamarin actually
delivers better results than native development.
”
—Ivan Kirkorau, Solutions Architect, EPAM

A customer-centric approach
Davies believes the most important thing in creating an
app is listening to customers. “As developers, we sometimes
forget we work for an airline. It’s not just customers buying
tickets... it’s our ground crew, our staff, the people on the
floor. It’s important to see what they actually do so you give
them what they truly need and not just what you think they
need.”
This, along with the ease of cross-platform development
provided by EPAM through Xamarin, has helped the
company think more expansively about the place of apps
in their business model. As Davies explains, “Ultimately, this
app is a base to see how well it’s taken. We want to create
other apps, such as one to assist our ground crew. More
people are going to be using larger phones, and we want to
use Xamarin to create a vault of apps that can help them do
their daily jobs no matter what device they use.”
About Xamarin
Xamarin is the new standard for enterprise
mobile development. No other platform
enables businesses to reach all major devices
across iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows with
100% fully native apps from a single code
base. With Xamarin, businesses standardize
mobile app development in C#, share an
average of 75% source code across platforms,
and leverage their existing skills, teams, tools
and code to rapidly deliver great apps with
broad reach. Xamarin is used by more than
100 Fortune 500 companies in 120 countries,
and has over one million unique developer
downloads.
For more information visit xamarin.com,
read our blog, and follow us on Twitter at
@xamarinhq.
“
More people are going to
be using larger phones, and
we want to use Xamarin to
create a portfolio of apps
that can help them do their
daily jobs no matter what
device they use.
”
—Christopher Davies,
Project Manager, easyJet