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HotelTonight uses Looker to improve supply chain and product analytics across a rapidly growing business
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Demand Planning & Forecasting
- Predictive Quality Analytics
Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
HotelTonight, a last-minute travel service, collects large amounts of accurate data on hotel inventory, then connects available rooms to consumers at the exact moment the need arises. As a fast-paced business dealing in highly complex data, HotelTonight needed on-the-spot data analytics. Sales, product management, and account management staff had logical questions. What is the right price point for a given hotel in a given region? How many rooms are likely to be available during a particular event? The answers lay in the company’s database, but couldn’t be accessed through any natural-language discovery process. Most of HotelTonight’s data is transactional. Before Looker, they used a MySQL database to track variables such as pricing, hotel availability, rooms secured, and customer activity. They could only analyze data by running manual queries and reports, or through a complicated Ruby on Rails document management system—both time-consuming and inflexible processes that required engineering support.
About The Customer
HotelTonight was founded in late 2010 to provide easy mobile booking of same-day unsold hotel inventory, creating a dynamic marketplace for hotels seeking to improve fill rates and increase revenue. This last-minute travel service collects large amounts of accurate data on hotel inventory, then connects available rooms to consumers at the exact moment the need arises. In partnering with Looker, HotelTonight has implemented a robust yet simple-to-use BI platform that transforms customer and market data into valuable insights. They can now rely on sophisticated supply chain and product analytics to improve demand forecasting and price prediction. As a result, their partner hotels are attracting more customers, and more consumers are turning to HotelTonight as a last-minute resource.
The Solution
HotelTonight decided to outsource to Looker. They started by moving all their user transaction data—billions of user events—to a more scalable MPP database, choosing Amazon’s new Redshift product. From there, they piped everything into Looker, which has since become the endpoint, their single source for all analytics. Though in some cases, HotelTonight analysts may move data into R for more advanced modeling and visualization. Thanks to Looker’s simplified natural-language approach, the HotelTonight data team quickly replaced tedious, error-prone processes. They now have the tools and bandwidth to dig deep into the data, to ask more nuanced questions, and to arrive at insights that would have been hard to discover. At the same time, HotelTonight analysts have developed their questions into frameworks they can share across the entire organization.
Operational Impact
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