Rebuilding the digital front door of King Khalid International Airport
AHD Solutions partnered with Kogifi to replatform KKIA’s traveler-facing experience on a composable DXP — delivering Arabic-first content, real-time flight intelligence and a 35 M passenger-ready platform.
Outcomes, before the long story
What we were asked to solve
Monolithic, server-rendered, no Arabic-first model. Editors waited 30+ minutes for previews.
Peak-season spikes (Hajj, Q4 travel) overloaded a stack never designed for real-time flight data.
Arabic, English and pilot French content across 4 regional sub-brands needed unified governance.
Marketing changes took 5–9 business days. The team needed self-serve editorial without engineering tickets.
One of the busiest hubs in the Gulf region
King Khalid International Airport (KKIA) is the principal gateway to Riyadh and a strategic hub in Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 aviation plan. Operated by Riyadh Airports Company on behalf of the General Authority of Civil Aviation.
Six principles we held to
A best-of-breed DXP stack with clear seams. Each capability replaceable without re-platforming.
RTL primitives in the design system, content modeling and editorial workflow — not a translation afterthought.
.NET 8 BFF on the edge stitches XM Cloud, flight data and CRM. The frontend talks to one schema.
Behavioral + flight-context signals fuel rules. We instrumented before we personalized.
32 contributors across 4 BUs. Editor experience treated with the same rigor as the traveler one.
AHD + Kogifi + client engineers on the same rota during launch. Runbooks are the deliverable.
Composable, layered, observable
14 months · six phases
Stakeholder workshops across 4 business units, audit of legacy WCMS, content inventory and traveler journey mapping.
What changed for KKIA
Session depth grew 3.1× across logged-in travelers in the first 6 months.
LCP dropped from 3.8s to 1.2s (p75) thanks to edge SSR + ISR.
From 5–9 business days to under 30 minutes for routine editorial updates.
Measured edge-to-origin over the first 12 months post-launch.
32 editors across 4 business units, surveyed after 90 days on the new CMS.
Live across loyalty tier, market, intent and travel context (e.g. departing-now).
What we'd tell our future selves
Editorial governance and taxonomy modeling saved us 6 weeks of rework downstream.
Tokenizing direction unlocked Arabic-first design and made future languages a config change.
OpenTelemetry from week one meant personalization rules were tuned on real data, not hunches.
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