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Magellan Vacations Cuts Costs, Boosts Data Access with Sisense
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
- Remote Collaboration
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
When CEO Andrew Vignuzzi joined Magellan Vacations, his priority was to enable everyone at the company to access, manipulate, and draw insights from their data quickly. The company needed a BI solution that could provide real-time feedback for agents on sales closings, destination performance, and other metrics. Additionally, the solution had to be user-friendly enough for non-technical users to create their own reports and drill down into the data. The dashboards needed to be agile and scalable without requiring major infrastructure upgrades. The personalized, phone-based service of Magellan Vacations made it difficult to track standard sales metrics like closing rates, commissions, and bookings by destination automatically. The company had already trialed a leading in-memory technology, but its performance was sub-par, requiring specialist IT resources and consultants to work with the tool's proprietary scripts. This tool did not meet their needs, prompting the search for a better solution.
About The Customer
Magellan Vacations, established in 2000, is a luxury hotel booking company that caters to discerning travelers seeking personalized recommendations about hotel rooms. The company exclusively works with four- and five-star properties in key destinations such as Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City. Instead of booking online, customers discuss their options with highly trained booking agents who have firsthand experience of the rooms. This approach allows the agents to provide detailed feedback over the phone. Magellan Vacations employs 75 people, including teams for bookings, marketing, and IT. The company's focus on phone bookings creates a more personalized experience for customers but also presents challenges in tracking typical sales metrics.
The Solution
Magellan Vacations experimented with several tools before discovering Sisense. The previous tools presented usability, cost, or infrastructure challenges. For instance, continuing with the previous tool would have required outsourcing reporting at a high cost and hiring a new IT staff member for $80,000 per year, in addition to the software cost. Sisense offered a near real-time dashboard that did not slow down the company's servers, regardless of the number of data sources accessed. The solution was intuitive enough for non-technical users to create their own reports. Sisense could handle any volume of data across multiple data sets with lightning-fast query speed. Users did not need SQL knowledge, and marketing and operations became more engaged in the reporting process. Sisense promised to reduce the burden on IT while offering a lower total cost of ownership than any other solution they had tried.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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