Spirit Airlines delivers seamless digital guest experiences with Dynatrace

Delivering efficient and seamless travel experiences

Spirit Airlines is working to expand its network by adding brand new planes and increasing the number of destinations it flies to throughout the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean. With a mantra of More Go, the airline offers high value flights at very affordable prices, while delivering an excellent guest experience. Its technology team manages many mission-critical applications that power the airline’s customer experience and support its internal operations.

Spirit uses various cloud-based online and mobile commercial applications that support customer self-service options, from booking flights and managing trips to self-check-in and baggage-tag printing. Additionally, the team oversees operational applications that are used to manage the fleet and maintenance crews. Teams need to resolve issues in these applications quickly, using capabilities beyond the traditional eyes-on-screen monitoring procedures. They also sought increased visibility into the customer journey and the third-party applications that are integrated with its services.

Extending observability to enhance the digital guest journey

The Spirit team sought an end-to-end observability solution to support its ambitious growth plans and meet guest expectations for seamless experiences. It turned to Dynatrace due to its answer-driven automation and digital experience monitoring capabilities, which could provide insight into Spirit’s hybrid technology stack and the digital guest journey. Dynatrace also provides extended oversight of external platforms such as third-party booking websites.

“Dynatrace offered all the capabilities we needed in a monitoring solution and more,” says Sagi Varghese, Senior Director for IT Services at Spirit. “Its features enable us to have deep insights into the guest experience. Such valuable data enables us to respond to variations in digital guest experience quickly. With Dynatrace, we can also map out external dependencies to the digital guest experience.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster resolution times: Dynatrace’s automatic and continuous discovery capabilities are utilized by Spirit to maintain constant visibility into its entire application stack. Its trustworthy AIOps and automation capabilities give teams confidence that their environment is under constant vigilance, eliminating the need for labor-intensive manual monitoring techniques.
• Valuable insights into third-party services: Dynatrace not only maps out Spirit’s own internal ecosystem, but also external dependencies for the digital guest experience, such as aggregate booking sites. Dynatrace’s synthetic monitoring capabilities play an important role in evaluating the performance of any third-party dependencies.
• Unparalleled visibility into airport kiosks: With Grail, Dynatrace’s data lakehouse technology, Spirit ingests and analyzes data from a variety of sources that include airport kiosk functionality.  Teams can also analyze aggregate interactions across all self-service kiosks, identifying hotspots or areas that need focus. They can then use this insight to inform the airport operator of how they can ease passenger flow in areas with heavy footfall, or notify them of hardware they need to replace, to optimize future customer journeys.
• Enhanced digital guest experiences: Dynatrace’s Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities give Spirit’s teams visibility into how guests navigate the airline’s digital applications. Spirit strives to be proactive in managing application performance and resolve issues before they impact end-users.

“At Spirit, we’re focused on investing in every facet of the guest experience, while at the same time keeping our fares affordable,” continued Varghese. “These investments span our entire our business, from having one of the youngest and most fuel-efficient fleets in the industry, to installing new cabin amenities like enhanced seats and high-speed Wi-Fi. This effort also extends to our state-of-the-art digital technology platforms. We’re thankful for a partner like Dynatrace for supporting our growth and efforts to provide excellent digital experiences for our guests.”