Case study
Swiftype to Elasticsearch Serverless Migration for an Airline
How SquareShift unified search across five domains and five languages for an airline group, migrating from Swiftype to Elasticsearch Serverless.
A major American airline group modernizing its enterprise search infrastructure and multi-domain content strategy.
Its platform spans more than five web domains and needed unified, high-precision search across five languages.
Web domains unified into a single search index. Languages served with high-precision results (English, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Japanese). Replaced managed Swiftype with Elasticsearch Serverless for lower operational overhead.
Key servicesHow SquareShift delivered it.
The challenge
The client, a major American airline group, ran search on a legacy, managed Swiftype platform that had grown expensive to operate and increasingly limited as the business grew. Content was fragmented across more than five separate web domains, and the airline needed one high-precision search experience spanning five languages: English, Italian, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese.
The migration also had to keep two content pipelines running at once — legacy web pages and a new Headless CMS on Contentstack — without breaking search for either.
What we delivered
SquareShift moved the airline from Swiftype to Elasticsearch Serverless, consolidating content from all five-plus domains into a single, centralized index. A hybrid ingestion layer combined the Elastic Open Web Crawler for domain scanning with custom Python scripts for Contentstack integration, so legacy and new content could flow into the same pipeline simultaneously.
The team tuned relevance with index templates, custom ingest pipelines, synonyms, and query rules, then built dedicated Autocomplete and Search APIs to serve instant suggestions and full-text results to the frontend.
The payoff
The airline now runs unified, high-precision search across more than five domains and five languages on a serverless architecture that removes the operational overhead of the old managed platform. Legacy and Headless CMS content both flow through the same pipeline, so the migration didn’t force a choice between the two.
Unifying five web domains into one index is the infrastructure move — the harder problem is ranking results consistently across five languages without one language's relevance quietly degrading the others.
Cloud Modernization Practice Lead, SquareShift
Where this work sits