The biggest teams at Secret Escapes are the people who have to work with the hotels to negotiate rates, deals and partnerships. Qualitative data at their fingertips allows them to negotiate the best deal in minutes, not hours. 

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United Kingdom

Secret Escapes

Secret Escapes operates in 21 countries worldwide. They are the UK’s biggest members-only website that runs best-in-market sales of four-and five-star hotels and holidays, offering members luxury travel deals at low prices.

Tableau Data Visualisation Snowflake

Informed conversations

“For sales, it’s essential to be able to have an informed conversation. You need to know how much you charged last time, how many similar hotels are going for on your website, and if special events are taking place. The past two years have been especially interesting for secret escapes, as hotels were much more eager to negotiate a deal to maintain minimum occupancy.”
Luke Slater, Account Manager Biztory UK: “Before our collaboration, Secret Escapes’ BI team created monthly datasets in their databases based on the questions they anticipated the different sales teams would request that month. People could download these data sets and play around with them, and they lacked joined-up thinking and the ability to build on other people’s insights.”

 

Snowflake & Tableau: a powerful combo

Luke: “We started by migrating all their data from the database into Snowflake. It’s fast, and it can bring data in from many different places, allowing for many more data points and impactful insights. On top of that, we have Tableau installed for data visualisation and insights. All the questions everyone asks every day are perfectly presented. Still, their smart tech-savvy salespeople also use their Explorer skills to connect directly to the data and create their personalised data insights. While the sales talk to hotels, they can now make smart decisions on the fly with always up-to-date data at their fingertips and do on the spot data analysis for negotiations. We got the feedback that sales can now make smarter pricing decisions in minutes, not hours. That’s just fabulous.”

The impact of a Site License

Joe Clarke, country manager UK: “What makes Secret Escapes different from many of our customers is that they purchased a Tableau 'Site License' to be a truly data-driven company. Thanks to this site license, every one of their 370 employees have access to the full possibilities of Tableau. It’s no longer needed to manage different licenses or limit possibilities based on job roles – it gives a lot of peace of mind. Everyone has access to great quality data if it’s not confidential, of course, and everyone can get all the insights to do their job to the best of their capabilities. This is a game-changer for a company like Secret Escapes. In return, we negotiated an excellent license deal with Tableau.”

Exemplary change management

Joe: “We did a gradual rollout to guarantee high adaption. Now that everyone loves this new approach to data analysis, the old way of working, with their legacy database, will slowly be phased out. It is still there for those that insist on writing SQL. We are convinced that the old database will become obsolete over time by offering this more powerful tool in parallel, which has clean data and more analytical possibilities. It’s the best example I’ve seen of smart data change management that allows for different needs to be fulfilled while still pushing for qualitative data and ease. On top of that, we are providing Secret Escapes with training, enablement and a community of people to make sure they are successful in their transformation.”

Watch the Secret Escapes Data Story here

 

 

 

 

 

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