HotelTonight relies on New Relic for application monitoring and performance management as company accelerates growth and expansion

• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management

• Business Operation
• Sales & Marketing

• Predictive Quality Analytics
• Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

• Software Design & Engineering Services
• System Integration

HotelTonight, a fast-growing company that helps travelers find last-minute hotel reservations at discounted prices, faced a significant challenge in developing and launching their application in time for the holiday season. The company had a goal of being included in the iOS app store by December 2010, which meant having the application fully tested and ready to go by late November. With such an ambitious goal, the ability to rapidly debug performance issues was essential. The company's service has two components: the HotelTonight mobile app and the Extranet, an internal web-based application for development, customer service, and hotels participating in the program. The mobile app is the most heavily trafficked part of the service, and the Extranet is used by the internal team, customer support, and hotels participating in the service. Each day, hotels input their room availability and rates into the Extranet. The Extranet also produces history and usage reports for the participating hotels so they can easily view their history and success rates using HotelTonight. Some hotels also use third-party inventory and reservation systems gateways and APIs to load the evening’s available rooms.

HotelTonight is a fast-growing company founded in 2010 by CEO Sam Shank, CTO Chris Bailey, and COO Jared Simon. The company provides a platform that helps travelers find last-minute hotel reservations at discounted prices. The application gives hotels an opportunity to fill unused rooms while providing travelers appealing lodging options. Beyond “last minute” bookings for road warriors or travelers stranded because of flight cancellation, “regular people” use HotelTonight to plan spontaneous weekend getaways or terrific lodging deals close to home. HotelTonight is committed to providing a range of good hotels for travelers seeking last-minute lodging. The company is highly selective about which hotels it accepts into their program. Their app makes it easy for travelers to decide which hotel best meets their needs. Traveler satisfaction with the room and the overall experience is paramount. In less than two years, HotelTonight has grown to more than 70 employees with offices in San Francisco and London, and a distributed support team. The service includes hotels in 60 cities from Hawaii to Amsterdam. And the company continues to add hotels at a rapid pace, with increased focus on Europe.

From the beginning, the team relied on New Relic for application performance management as a key component of their development and production strategy. New Relic helped troubleshoot performance, optimize their code, and monitor traffic spikes that impact performance. HotelTonight uses New Relic in their production environment to monitor application traffic, ongoing performance, and the overall health of the application. Chris Bailey, Co-Founder and CTO at HotelTonight, has implemented the third-party menu bar add-on for Macs that continually show him New Relic metrics so he can see at a glance if there’s anything out of the ordinary going on. He also uses Custom Dashboards to monitor traffic or activity that is out of the ordinary. If something is unusual, he goes right to the New Relic Dashboard to take a closer look. Part of the way that Chris prioritizes the team’s work is to look at the worst-performing actions. They often use Transaction Traces to dig down into more detailed information. Or, they might see a particularly bad spike that they aren’t sure about and need more detail on. Transaction Traces allow them to narrow things down more quickly. They can hypothesize all they want about where the problem is, but having the real data and specific reporting New Relic provides, means they don’t have to waste time figuring out where the problem is. They can identify the source of the issue quickly.

• Using New Relic has been a big productivity boost for the HotelTonight team. It gives them insight into what’s normal so they can monitor to make sure the app is functioning properly. They can see the health of the application with a quick glance which translates into confidence and time savings.
• The combination of monitoring and performance optimization allows HotelTonight to resolve issues faster and improve their planning. They can see their traffic spikes and plan for them. The insight New Relic gives them helps them to stay ahead of the curve, rather than just react.
• Using New Relic has had a direct impact on the company’s customer experience. They were able to identify and resolve a performance issue with their most heavily used API, improving the speed at which customers can find hotel choices.

• In most instances, HotelTonight can resolve issues in under an hour, start to finish, often even faster.
• Customers looking for hotel choices in a given city now get their choices twice as fast.