easyJet Customer Experience Soars in the Cloud

Taking the turbulence out of IT services

Running an airline is complex. There's the front-end experience travelers see—online bookings, flight scheduling and management, cabin crew and aircraft rostering. And then there are the back-end systems that sit behind the traveler experience: the databases, IT network, and business applications that make an airline run smoothly each day. For easyJet, delivering smooth and memorable travel experiences is more than just a business metric, it's a guiding principle.

"Disruption is awful, both for our travelers and for our crews," says Simon Challis, senior technology manager at easyJet. "A typical plane might take off from London, land in Paris, go on to Amsterdam, and then must be in London again the next morning. Any delay in that chain affects every leg of that journey—from the crew who ready the aircraft for flight to the travelers needing to get to their destinations."

Fighting complexity with Cisco Full-Stack Observability

easyJet is now undergoing a journey toward full-stack observability to address existing challenges and take advantage of new opportunities in technology and for the business. The airline is focused on moving to a cloud environment so it can continue to improve its service quality while gaining improved visibility and control over its IT operations. Challis's team sits at the center of that journey, serving easyJet, easyjet.com, and many other departments across the organization. Its transformation is guided by three IT imperatives:

1. The data center is the cloud. Rather than on-premise infrastructure, easyJet's data center and data operations will sit on cloud services.
2. The Internet is the network. Rather than building and managing a home-grown IT network, which is prone to legacy issues, easyJet is shifting its workloads to a software-defined network architecture, specifically SD-WAN.
3. The office is anywhere. easyJet crew and regional teams need to access key business applications from any location to ensure they are in the right place at the right time, performing the right service for customers.

In short, easyJet is becoming a digital, data-driven organization with the customer at the center. "We need to manage an IT organization as complex as our flight network, and we are increasingly leaning toward the cloud and digital services to work more precisely and efficiently," says Challis. "That requires visibility across every piece of our IT stack, from our network to the database to our digital customer services."

Continuous improvement with a central monitoring platform

easyJet began its journey to full-stack observability by first joining forces with Cisco AppDynamics to optimize its customer-facing services, specifically the easyjet.com website. Peak loads on this channel can grow exponentially, especially during its roster releases when the airline publishes new routes at attractive rates. According to Challis, easyJet can sell 1000 seats per minute in these moments.

With Cisco AppDynamics, easyJet can anticipate and head off performance issues before they materialize. Running load tests to uncover weak points in its customer experience and purchasing journey allow the team to understand how much load its website can take, what gaps need to be filled, and how it needs to work with its software partners to ensure a smooth customer experience during these make-or-break periods.

"Optimization doesn't happen in the heat of the moment when your systems are at max capacity and you're just trying to keep up. It happens in the lead-up, when you have time to find faults before they occur," says Challis. "With Cisco AppDynamics, we are constantly gathering information on how to improve our platform and make life better for our employees and customers."

One of easyJet's first wins with Cisco AppDynamics was the relaunch of easyJet holidays in 2019, turning it from a white label site for booking flight plus hotel to a true subsidiary of the organization. The ability to monitor and optimize the easyJet holidays platform throughout the integration allowed the business to complete a successful launch in just six months. Today, easyJet holidays is turning a healthy profit and going from strength to strength.

Service improvements from the database to the jetway

Looking to add end-to-end visibility across its network, easyJet embraced Cisco ThousandEyes to gain detailed insight into its network and SaaS cloud solutions. Then, by integrating Cisco ThousandEyes with Cisco AppDynamics, easyJet embarked on its Cisco Full-Stack Observability journey, to monitor every application and service that touches its customers.

Usage of Cisco Full-Stack Observability capabilities, from the network to end-user applications, is a key pillar of easyJet's transformation, and gives easyJet end-to-end visibility inside its organization, to the network edge, and beyond.

Crews at easyJet's dozens of European bases can connect easily and reliably to the business applications they need to perform their jobs, no matter where they are based. Every location operates as integrated easyJet offices rather than as a remote team with limited IT access.

This level of insight proved invaluable when monitoring a critical crew management application. "If our crew can't access time-sensitive information, it can result in even a few minutes of delay that could be detrimental to the customer experience," says Challis.

His team used Cisco Full-Stack Observability for a complete view of the performance and availability of key applications and its dependencies. With improved observability, easyJet is able to pinpoint the source of any issue quickly and is able to resolve the issue, eliminating any recurrence.

"In the past, we knew there was a fault, but we had no way of knowing if it was in the application layer, middleware, or the database. Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes unified dashboard gives us a full view of the user experience from end-to-end, helping us resolve an issue with one of our most critical applications," says Challis.

A data-driven airline with a view from above

The complete picture easyJet gained with Cisco Full-Stack Observability has turned the airline into a true data-driven organization with a culture of continuous improvement and optimization. easyJet's use of Cisco AppDynamics extends from the application level down into the database, further down into the infrastructure layer, and up into its employee experience. Combine that with the usage of Cisco ThousandEyes, which covers its network performance, and the company gains an integrated view of its technology stack that covers all three of its IT imperatives as it migrates operations to AWS.

Eyeing a new horizon with non-stop innovation

The strides easyJet has made in IT performance, reliability, and customer experience is only the beginning. Challis and his team are looking to get more proactive in their use of data to help ensure easyJet's internal platforms constantly evolve with user demands.

"We pride ourselves on being a data-driven airline, both in the sky and in the way we experiment with new technologies to better meet customers' needs," says Challis. "With Cisco Full-Stack Observability, we have gained real-time insight and control over our observability data, which means we can keep enhancing our services for employees and travelers alike."