Aviasales is a popular service among travelers who seek cost-effective tickets and affordable places to stay. The Aviasales users do 1.4M searches every day via iOS, Android, Windows Phone apps, and the website. Ilia Kukharev from the Aviasales team says the popularity came due to the launch of the multilingual versions, and today “some apps drive revenue only from organic traffic, thanks to localization.”
Crowdin helped the company with the fundamental shift away from manual translation management toward automation and continuous localization. Today, the Aviasales team manages all their localization initiatives via Crowdin, releases new app versions every two weeks, and translates content in 40+ languages in parallel.
This post includes the key takeaways from the Aviasales customer story. Read the full version for more details.
Connecting the Dots
At the start, the Aviasales localization team’s task seemed quite straightforward – share the texts with translators and add translations to the codebase. But connecting the dots in the localization process was much easier said than done, and localization became a huge team effort.
- All the routine tasks, like updating source files and files on the repo, took too much time.
- The team was not able to see the overall translation progress and plan the release dates accurately.
- Translators had no sufficient context, and fixing errors after the deploy slowed down the process even more.
"Managing all our freelancers and workflows used to occupy a significant amount of my day, and, honestly, wasn’t really what I wanted to spend my time doing.
What They Did
- Created project on Crowdin.
- Connected GitHub repository with it and scheduled content updates.
- Invited translators to the project with specific access to languages.
- Uploaded app screenshots to give translators some background information.
Once the setup was done, both source and translated files were kept in sync between Crowdin and GitHub. Translators received notifications on the new content and could use the project Translation Memory and Glossaries to provide consistent translations faster.
Faster Launch, Fewer Errors, and Increased Efficiency
With Crowdin, Aviasales improved the overall localization process, and multilingual versions opened new business opportunities for the company.
- The texts are now available for translation prior to the actual release.
- Translators work on the content on Crowdin using localization resources available.
- The process that consisted of 7 steps now turned into an automated cycle that requires minimum involvement from the development team.
- Multilingual versions are launched within a set schedule – every two weeks.
- The localization team saves 15% of their work time and can now focus on the localization strategy and exploring new markets.
- After the localized version launch, Aviasales got X10 more downloads on the App Store and Google Play Market, and X5 increased revenue.
Moral of the Story
- By localizing your app, you increase its visibility on the App Store and Google Play Market and make it appeal to a new user base.
- If not done with the right technology, localization adds more complexity to your processes and slows down the release cycles.
- Through Crowdin automation, you can build a continuous localization cycle and keep releasing multilingual app versions without any delays.
