Case Study: Lonely Planet achieves 200% faster incident response with PagerDuty

Lonely Planet Helping Travelers Plan a Trip of a Lifetime with PagerDuty

Lonely Planet, the Melbourne-based publisher and operator of lonelyplanet.com, supports millions of monthly visitors across 8,000 destination pages and 200,000 attractions and must stay up 24/7 to protect ad and e‑commerce revenue. With a rapid release cadence and no long QA process, the engineering team needed reliable, fine‑grained alerting and easier global on‑call scheduling after their Nagios/CloudWatch setup produced noisy, unreliable alerts and a difficult UI.

By adopting PagerDuty (integrated with Nagios, CloudWatch and Datadog), Lonely Planet quickly implemented customizable routing so the right people are notified, reducing wasted context switches and accelerating fixes. The result: mean time to acknowledgement improved by 200%, incident acknowledgement times dropped from minutes or hours to seconds, engineering productivity increased, and the team gained unified visibility across monitoring tools—delivering less downtime and better customer experience.

Lonely Planet

Mark Jennings

Director of Technical Operations