Meliá Hotels International Accelerates Digital Transformation with Dynatrace

Scaling to meet record travel demand

As the world recovered from the pandemic, demand for international travel surged to record levels. In anticipation of this, Meliá needed to ensure its booking services could scale rapidly, to maintain and optimize user-experience during sudden peaks, when travel restrictions lifted. It also needed to allow its guests to access more hotel services via the mobile and web platforms where they prefer to interact.

To enable this, Meliá accelerated its digital transformation, by migrating its critical applications to a cloud-native environment, running on Kubernetes in AWS. This provided the scalability and agility Meliá needed to meet soaring demand for bookings and release better digital functionality faster. However, the dynamic nature of its new cloud-native architecture made it difficult to maintain the observability needed to optimize its services with traditional monitoring approaches. Meliá needed a modern solution to ensure it could maximize revenue and deliver frictionless guest experiences.

Meeting the needs of modern travellers

Meliá identified Dynatrace® as the best solution for its requirements, due to the platform’s ability to provide automatic and intelligent observability in complex Kubernetes environments. Dynatrace’s broad and deep observability and advanced AIOps capabilities would allow Meliá to ensure its digital services deliver the same quality experience as in-person interactions with hotel staff. It would also provide the precise answers Meliá’s teams needed to reduce time spent resolving problems, so they could focus on digital innovation.

“Maintaining frictionless relationships between staff and guests, while also reducing in-person contact, has been a critical goal for our teams as part of the Stay Safe with Meliá program,” said Christian Palomino, Vice President of Global IT, Meliá Hotels International. “To achieve this, we have accelerated delivery of new digital services that enable our guests to do things like check-in or book a table in our restaurants via our mobile app, reducing the need for person-to-person contact, and Dynatrace has been critical to this effort. Dynatrace gives us the precise, AI-powered insights we need to understand exactly how our customers interact with our applications, and how their experiences impact our business.”

Life with Dynatrace

• Faster digital innovation: With Dynatrace, Meliá’s teams are rededicating their focus to finding new ways to accommodate the rapidly evolving preferences of the modern traveller. This helped the hotel chain reduce the reliance on in-person interactions,  leading to an increase in the volume of transactions handled through its digital channels from around 40% at the end of 2019, to more than 80% during the pandemic, which was a major asset through those difficult times.
• Unparalleled insight into the guest experience: The precise answers from Dynatrace help Meliá discover where guests are struggling during their interactions with the hotel’s digital services. This enables its teams to identify what they need to do to optimize the user experience and ensure guests can fully relax during their stay.
• Improved operational efficiency: Meliá’s teams previously wasted time manually triaging and troubleshooting issues, searching through monitoring data to discover the source of any problems with its digital services. Now, Dynatrace points to the precise root cause instantly, so Meliá’s teams can jump straight into resolving issues before guest experiences are impacted. In addition, this gives them time back to focus on driving innovation and constantly improving digital services.
• Better customer care: In the rare event that hotel guests do experience problems with Meliá’s digital services, Dynatrace’s intuitive interface means teams across the wider business also have access to its insights. This gives Meliá’s support teams the precise answers they need to provide faster, more personalized resolutions, and ultimately deliver a greater standard of care.

“The cloud and Dynatrace have transformed the way our business operates and how our teams work in this modern era,” continued Palomino. “Before Dynatrace, we used to spend hours manually searching through metrics, logs, and traces to piece together insights about user experience. Now, this takes minutes or seconds. This has enabled our teams to focus more time on driving business and customer value, and to ensure our ongoing success during what has been a challenging time in our industry.”