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In 1985, Travelodge reinvented the concept of the low cost overnight stay by launching the UK’s first budget hotel chain. Since those early days, Travelodge has gone from strength to strength. It is now the UK’s largest independent hotel brand, with more than 560 hotels and 40,000 guest bedrooms, right across the UK as well as in Ireland and Spain.

You’ll find Travelodge hotels in the center of major cities, including London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham, Belfast, Dublin, Barcelona, and Madrid; in most of Britain’s larger towns, as well as in the classic seaside locations and vital roadside stops. The company offers unbeatable value in leisure and business travel with attractive modern bedrooms and comfortable new king size beds wherever travelers need to be.

Staying competitive through dataIn the competitive budget hotel industry, Travelodge aims to become the favorite hotel for value. But the company faced challenges from new entrants such as Airbnb and other budget hotel chains. To stay competitive, Travelodge wanted to enhance hospitality through new hotels and renovations and optimize its revenue by offering the right price for the right hotels to its customers.

Niall Hammond, Data Architect for Travelodge, is responsible for ensuring the company has the correct data architecture solutions in place to improve data quality and availability and ensure data is processed in the most effective way. He explains the company’s strategy for optimizing revenue. “Our goal was to provide personalized offers to our customers in order to maximize occupancy at our hotels. To do this, we needed to know and understand our customers better through data and combine this understanding with occupancy forecasting data.”

As a small to medium-sized organization, Travelodge faced IT barriers to achieving this goal: a small data architecture team and disparate data. Two years ago, the company migrated its on-premise SQL data warehouse to Microsoft Azure SQL in the cloud to gain resiliency, scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness. However, Travelodge was still suffering from core data integration structure problems and needed to replace the SQL code it used for Lift and Shift with standardized integration jobs from a proven solution.

Why Talend?Travelodge wanted an enterprise data management tool to streamline data integration so it could undertake data projects to know and understand its customers and fill under-occupied hotels. The company chose Talend Cloud Data Management.

“We chose Talend Cloud for its data integration, data management, and data quality capabilities and for its speed, flexibility, comprehensive features, mature platform, and need for little overhead,” says Hammond.

Doing the work entirely in-house, the company went live with Talend in just four weeks. “With Talend, we were able to rapidly accommodate the many requirements from our third-party partner,” says Hammond.

Talend manages Travelodge’s 180-gigabyte operational data store, which houses its customer information. Talend processes 2,000 executions daily and moves 400 gigabytes per month to internal systems and third-party partners, a data volume that will quadruple in the coming months as Talend is used for additional projects.

Optimizing hotel revenue through better customer understanding

“Talend helps us ensure we provide personalized offers to our guests in order to maximize occupancy at our hotels. The project has helped return millionsof pounds additional revenue per year.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Hospitality

INFORMATION• HQ: UK

• 10,000+ employees

USE CASE• Customer experience • Forecast of room occupancy • Revenue management

CHALLENGE• Staying competitive through data

TALEND PRODUCT USED• Talend Cloud Data Management (with Talend Cloud Data Quality)

PARTNER• Microsoft Azure

RESULTS

• Reduced time to make data available to data scientists from 3 to 4 days to a half day

• Reduced time to resolve issues from 3 to 4 days to a half an hour

• Optimized pricing, helping return millions of pounds additional revenue per year

”Niall Hammond, Data Architect, Travelodge

Talend also updates the cloud data warehouse with data from Travelodge’s websites. The key applications utilizing Talend are Oracle Hospitality OPERA Room Reservation system, IDeaS Hotel Revenue Management software, MoEngage Omni-Channel Marketing systems and Reflexis Task Management software.

Hammond has been surprised at the speed with which Talend can onboard new data sources. “In the past, to make 12 tables of data available to the data scientists from the website, it would have taken 3 to 4 days. With Talend, we can do it in a half a day.”

With Talend, IT support costs for Talend are almost zero and support days have been reduced from 15 to near 0 annually. “I have not had to log a support call yet. I can go into the Talend community and find the answer from other open source users,” Hammond says. “That is massively valuable resource because usually if your DevOps team gets stuck, no matter how good the support, it used to take 3 to 4-days to get the answer which would be a block on a project. Now, with Talend, it takes a half an hour to resolve because I can find the answer myself.”

He continues, “I’ve worked with different ETL tools at other companies. I have been extremely pleased with the maturity of the Talend tool and how easy it is to implement projects.”

Offering the right price for the right hotels and filling hotel roomsTravelodge’s core use case for Talend is to combine its understanding of its customers with data about reservations and room occupancy to sell customers additional rooms in under-occupied hotels at an optimal price.

Talend sends customer data from the operational data store and sends it to Travelodge’s third-party marketing partner. Azure SQL Server database takes a copy of the occupancy forecasting data from IDeaS and reservations data from Opera and uses Talend to forward the data to the marketing partner. The partner uses all of this data in MoEngage to customize offers to customers. The project has helped return millions of pounds additional revenue per year.

“With Talend, we can put ourselves in our customers’ shoes, understand what’s most important to them, in a location where they need to be, at a price they are prepared to pay,” says Hammond. “We can also understand how busy a hotel will be so rooms can be marketed at an appropriate price and ensure we have appropriate staffing to provide a good customer experience. This way we are operating in a cost-effective manner.”

Hammond and his team are also developing a Property Management Master project with Talend that will provide Travelodge with a “golden source” of information about each of its hotels. The project will utilize Talend to integrate the various sources of information about each hotel in a Property Master database in the operational data store and provide third-party partners with data about properties and staff. Travelodge is using Reflexis Task Management platform to enable hotel managers to automate processes such as check-ins, cleaning, and maintenance.

“The Property Master project is another way in which we are using Talend to improve the customer experience,” Hammond says.By using Talend Cloud Data Quality as part of the project, Travelodge was able to surface some data quality issues within its internal property data and mediate them. The company will also use Talend Cloud Data Stewardship as part of the project. In addition, Travelodge’s data scientists will soon use Talend Cloud Data Pipeline in their work.

Hammond says trusting your data is critical, especially when it comes to customer data. Talend enables Travelodge to restrict access to the operational data store to everyone but Hammond, eliminating unnecessary security holes.

“It’s quite important that our development and production environments are totally separate from one another. Talend makes that possible while allowing us to deploy the DevOps code release cycle. This privacy by design is easy to implement and crucial when dealing with customer data.”

“We decided to migrate to the cloud using both Talend Cloud and Microsoft Azure SQL. We gained resiliency, scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness.”

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