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Magellan Vacations Case Study

Overview

In 2000, a travel professional realized that there was a huge niche market for travel: luxury hotel bookings focusing strictly on four- and five-star properties. Magellan Vacations was born. The company caters to discerning travelers looking for personalized recommendations about the location, view, and overall comfort of each hotel room.

Instead of booking a room online, Magellan Vacations customers converse with carefully-trained booking agents. These agents have stayed in the luxurious hotels they book for clients in core destinations like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City. Magellan Vacations agents work hard to deliver a luxury hotel experience that begins with the phone call. The company employs over 75 people, including booking agents, a marketing department, and IT staff.

Challenge

Because Magellan Vacations clients speak to agents by phone, the company needs to track typical sales metrics, like closing rates, commissions, and bookings by destination. When Andrew Vignuzzi, COO came on board Magellan Vacations, the company was already testing a leading in-memory technology – but the software’s performance was sub-par. It required specialist IT resources to work with the tool proprietary scripts and consultants to work with and modify the application. Put simply, this tool wasn’t living up to our needs.

Vignuzzi wanted everyone in the company to be able to work quickly with data and Magellan needed a solution that had three main requirements:

1 Near real-time feedback for agents on sales closings, destination performance, and other metrics that would help them better serve customers;

2 A dashboard and report-building mechanism that was simple enough for non-technical users to be able to create their own reports and drill down into data

3 Agile and scalable dashboards that don’t require major infrastructure upgrades, and won’t slow existing infrastructure as reports are generated.

Solution

Sisense wasn’t the first solution Magellan Vacations tried to wrangle its data with. The company had used several tools, but was either running into usability, cost or infrastructure challenges. To keep the tool it had prior to Sisense, the company would have needed to outsource reporting at great cost and would have had to hire a new IT staff member, to the tune of $80,000 per year on top of the cost of software.

Luckily, Vignuzzi found Sisense. The solution offered what he and his team needed: a near real-time dashboard that didn’t bog down the company’s servers no matter how many data sources it accessed, and a solution intuitive enough to allow non-technical users to create their own reports.

Sisense can handle any size data, with a near real-time query speed over large, various and disparate data sets. Users don’t need SQL knowledge to use it, and marketing and operations can be more engaged in the reporting process. Sisense took the burden off IT for reporting and results in a lower total cost of ownership. “We wanted a solution that would solve the real-time requirements of the sales floor,” Vignuzzi said. “Sisense can handle that kind of data problem, slice and dice information to provide the best visualization. Plus, end users could create the reports themselves.”