TUI soars above cloud complexity and gains a comprehensive customer view with Dynatrace

Fragmentation compounds complexity

TUI takes almost 20 million customers on holiday to 180 destinations worldwide each year and operates in five different source markets, each supported by its own traditional IT environment. This fragmented IT landscape created a challenge in delivering innovation at the rate the business, and its customers, demanded. With a mission to provide customers with the best moments of their lives, TUI recognized it needed to offer the best possible online booking experience from start to finish.

The company embarked on a strategy to consolidate its IT environments and move to a hybrid cloud operating model so innovation could be delivered faster and customer experience continually optimized.

“TUI is very passionate about customer experience. It sits at the heart of everything we do,” Yasin Quareshy, Head of Cloud Operations at TUI, said. “To provide really good experiences we need to have a deep understanding of how customers interact with us, and to do this we need digital platforms that allow us to deliver that service.”

The travel company set itself the goal of halving the time it takes for a new functionality idea to be delivered to customers. TUI recognized it needed to modernize and automate operations so teams could move away from firefighting problems and focus on creating new value for the organization. The way to do this was through the cloud.

Seeing through the clouds

TUI chose AWS to host its core application on, as it recognized that in moving to the cloud it would need new levels of visibility into what would now be a more complex hybrid cloud environment. After assessing key competitors, TUI selected Dynatrace because it was simple to implement and use – as well as being purpose-built in the cloud, for the cloud – and helped speed up this migration to AWS.

“The customer demands are there – customers want change, and we need to respond to that change,” Quareshy explained. “This is where our strategy of moving into the cloud space really helps us with the technology. Our aim is to deliver half the time from idea to the environment and with cloud, we can do that a lot faster.”

Dynatrace’s ability to provide deep visibility into both on-premises and cloud environments was key due to TUI’s complex technology stack. TUI also recognized that Dynatrace’s automation and AI capabilities would enable it to simplify operations and give the team more time to focus on bringing new features to market faster and, ultimately, providing a world-class customer experience.

“Dynatrace gives us a holistic view of our platforms all the way from our test environments through to production, and provides a single view of the truth across the business,” Quareshy explained. “It is definitely more than just APM. The automation and AI from Dynatrace set it apart from the competition. It gives us more information about how our entire software stack is performing. We can now do intelligent capacity management. We can innovate a lot better in rightsizing our environments and being very cost-efficient.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Speeding up AWS migration – Dynatrace helped to speed up TUI’s migration to AWS as the product was easy to set up and gave immediate visibility and insights into how its eCommerce applications would perform in the cloud.
• Fewer tools, simpler operations – Installing Dynatrace has enabled TUI to retire five other management and monitoring tools across its technology stack. Dynatrace’s integration with collaboration tools and incident management processes has helped to simplify IT operations. Over time, TUI plans to build on this to drive autonomous operations and self-healing into its environment.
• 50 percent time saving – Simplified operations coupled with the AI capabilities in Dynatrace has resulted in a 50 percent time saving in recovering services or resolving problems. Rather than spending hours looking for the root cause of a problem, Dynatrace instantly points TUI to the answers.
• AI keeps TUI’s platform stable, enabling 463% increase in bookings – Following the collapse of a major competitor, TUI saw a 254% surge in traffic, causing multiple issues across the stack. Davis® alerted the team as soon as the issue began, allowing TUI to proactively react and keep trading, taking 463% more bookings and safeguarding the business from at least £3.3m in potential lost revenue.
• Freedom to innovate and improve CX – The time saving Dynatrace is delivering has enabled TUI to focus more on delivering new features to its customers. TUI has also used the end-to-end view of the customer journey Dynatrace provides to better understand customer behavior and make changes to optimize their booking experience.

“From an operational perspective, since we’ve installed Dynatrace we’ve saved 50 percent of the time in recovering our services. We’re able to focus more on understanding how to fix the problem rather than doing problem determination,” said Yasin Quareshy.