Vacation.com Takes Off With WebFOCUS

Corporate-Wide BI Environment Creates a More Knowledgeable, Self-Sufficient Staff

For many travelers, making or missing a connection can mean the difference between setting a trip off on the right – or wrong – foot. Likewise, travel agencies depend on making smooth connections to keep their businesses profitable, especially with suppliers such as hotels, airlines, and cruise lines. Few companies understand this dynamic better than Vacation.com, a leisure-travel marketing organization that describes itself as "the bridge connecting consumers with experienced, knowledgeable travel professionals."

To forge stronger relationships with its network of 5,100-plus member agencies, Vacation.com uses business intelligence (BI) technology to share information, create reports, and target members with unique promotions. Information Builders WebFOCUS is their tool of choice. This user-friendly BI environment provides staff members with specific insight when they instigate call-out campaigns, create sales reports, and view agency metrics summarizing the various aspects of the business.

"We are able to target our offers more effectively now that WebFOCUS is providing information to our agents and staff," says Adrian Braun, business systems manager at Vacation.com. "We get a much better return on the time we invest in our campaigns."

A Familiar Point of Departure

Vacation.com chose WebFOCUS because of its undisputed reputation for providing organizations with the ability to gather and distribute accurate information. Formerly, analysts created most routine reports using Microsoft Excel or coded them in SQL, then E-mailed the results to users. Unfortunately, this process was fraught with inconsistencies. There were multiple people creating essentially the same reports, which meant they were often duplicating efforts. After years of dealing with these rigid and inflexible reporting practices, the staff wanted the ability to create interactive, parameterized reports to help users answer detailed questions themselves, minimizing the time and effort previously needed to obtain that information.

The first goal was to compile a group of reports that could fulfill a yearlong backlog of reporting requests. This involved compiling existing data into centralized reports for business domains such as revenue, agencies, programs, data validation, and products. Users access these interactive reports through a dashboard environment.

"Formerly we had lots of data spread across multiple screens," explains Braun. "WebFOCUS allowed us to replace 12 static reports with one parameterized report. Our employees have more ownership of the information and can hone in on just what they need. Everything is on one screen, which makes it much easier to find relevant information."

In addition, the team created several ad hoc reports to allow staff members to structure their own views of the data. Some reports are designed for executives, others are for accounting personnel, and others are shared with agents during visits to their offices. The Vacation.com staff who visit with member agencies can select dozens of metrics and data points and put them together in many different ways, including time-series data and point-in-time data. They can key in on precisely what they are looking for and dive deeper into the numbers, thereby giving them the tools to directly answer the members’ questions – without having to rely on IT.

For example, "Own the Member" reports list agencies that each Vacation.com staff member is responsible for. They contain key account information, such as year-to-date sales and conference attendance. Other reports help Vacation.com meet its goals for important sales events. The Agency Detail report offers a snapshot of everything Vacation.com has done to add value to each agency, including a four-year sales history with variances and percentage breakdowns.

Vacation.com’s sales team uses WebFOCUS to identify strengths and weaknesses in their territories, providing a good base from which to examine usage trends, monitor performance loads, and target promotions. For example, Vacation.com might push a particular cruise to its member agencies by offering a $100 shipboard credit on all bookings made during a certain time period. To maximize the effectiveness of these promotions, Vacation.com uses WebFOCUS reports and dashboards to identify the top agencies for this type of travel.

A Productive BI Journey

To facilitate its callout campaigns, Vacation.com developed a report that provides each employee with pertinent details about the agencies they are targeting, along with a summary report for the executive team.

"Without WebFOCUS we could not have created this report without a tremendous amount of work," says Matt Murroff, senior manager of revenue reporting at Vacation.com. "It saves employees about five minutes of database searching every time they make a call."

The savings add up quickly. For example, during one recent campaign, 70 employees made 30 customer calls each. Cutting out five minutes of searching from each call saved the team about 175 hours total. "Considering that the report took about 10 hours to develop and we can use it again with minimal modifications, it will pay dividends in the future as well," Muroff notes.

Vacation.com’s report-development team has also become more efficient. Eliminating the need to continually respond to repetitive report requests has enabled Vacation.com to reduce FTE/staff by 0.5 employees. "We can now focus on high-value projects rather than routine reporting requests," notes Tiffany Glass, vice president of technology and e-commerce at Vacation.com.

Additionally, WebFOCUS data validation reports improve data quality by correcting anomalies that have built up over the years. This enables Vacation.com to generate reports that are more accurate and effective. There has been a positive reaction from the user base due to more users accessing the data, which has lead to better data-cleansing techniques and quicker spotting of errors in the database.

Some WebFOCUS reports provide information that Vacation.com can share with member agencies to illustrate the value of a Vacation.com membership. For example, Vacation.com staff use WebFOCUS to review the free collateral items agencies have obtained as part of Vacation.com’s Engagement program. The reports let staff compute the value of those items, including promotional materials and vendor payouts. According to Braun, because this information is stored in various places within Vacation.com’s CRM system, it used to be difficult to access it in a cohesive way. WebFOCUS has turned that situation around. "An agent might spend 15 minutes just tracking down basic information," he says. "Now WebFOCUS ties it all together through interactive reports."

Better still, says Muroff, because WebFOCUS reports are accessible by all staff members Vacation.com has reduced ad hoc report requests. "Company information is no longer held by a few," he notes. "Instead, it is highly visible. This has made the entire company better decision-makers. WebFOCUS has helped the company to adopt a standardized view of key components of the business."

Finally, adds Glass, WebFOCUS reports have replaced hard-coded reports that were difficult to enhance and maintain. For example, they are being integrated into revenue and financial reporting cycles, enabling the revenue team to spend less time searching for data and more time analyzing it.

A New Horizon for Industry Analytics

As its experience with BI technology grows, Vacation.com plans to use its vast storehouse of search and transaction data to predict market trends and respond accordingly, such as to identify places and events that appear to be popular with travelers.

"Discovering not only what agents book but what they search for is very revealing," explains Braun. "We hope to be able to use this data to be more proactive as an organization and less reactive."

About Information Builders

Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for the past 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state-ofthe-art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data, and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Together, these products give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs. Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,450 people and has more than 350 business partners. More information is available at informationbuilders.com.