This is a story on how the world's leading destination management company turned the COVID-19 crisis into an opportunity to grow stronger, with the help of data.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on global travel and tourism. “As an industry, we were hit extremely hard and, in retrospect, it couldn't get any worse for us, as traveling was hardly possible and business trips were no longer an option,” explains Maximilian Wenger-Oehn, Head of Business Administration & IT at Liberty International Tourism Group.
However, as the world’s largest destination management company, Liberty took this crisis as an opportunity to improve and advance their data strategy, by drastically improving its data management set-up. In doing so, they have made sure they are prepared to meet the challenges of a post-COVID world head-on.
Liberty International Tourism Group (LITG) generates a huge amount of data which was in isolated data silos and not easily accessible. This made combined analysis of the different datasets extremely difficult, and the data only became usable after a number of time-consuming manual steps.
“We have aimed for a long-time to introduce a business intelligence solution that would eliminate this manual effort and manage our data in a better way,” says Christina Kaschnitz, Head of Controlling & Internal Audits at LITG, “however, there was never enough time for us to get started on such a long-term solution, so we have carried this project idea with us from one successful business year to the next.”
When the pandemic began LITG was hit hard, as they lost sales and had to reduce costs on all levels. This increased the need for a solution that would increase efficiency and eliminate costly, labor-intensive tasks and processes. At the same time, the crisis introduced new metrics the team needed to keep track of. “All of a sudden, completely new KPIs became relevant for us, so identifying and investing in a tool that will best meet new and existing requirements became a very important project for us,” explains Christina.
To overcome these challenges, the LITG team was looking for a solution that would act as a central hub for their diverse and rapidly growing data streams, and give them the ability to automate data management. “The automation possibilities of Adverity were crucial in helping us to eliminate errors in our data handling,” says Christina.
“Our goal was to reach a new level of data management by combining the multitude of available data, enabling us to generate new knowledge and better assess market developments.”
LITG uses Adverity to integrate, among other things, data from their CRM, HR, and finance, as well as data from social media channels. In addition to the central availability of the data, it was also important that the data could be made available to individual departments across the company as required. “The manual work we did before on data consolidation was time-consuming, error-prone, and slow. With Adverity we now have numerous possibilities in data analysis that we did not have before,” adds Christina.
This gives each stakeholder the right insight into their data at the click of a mouse. “What I also found very important is that the KPIs we work with can be displayed in different dimensions and views for different departments in the same way,” concludes Christina Kaschnitz.
“We are now able to react more quickly to changes in the market because we no longer have to monitor everything manually, thanks to the automated processes, reminder systems and notifications. We are now much faster, which gives us a significant competitive advantage and new possibilities in data analysis, helping us to further expand and sustainably consolidate our market leadership,” clarifies Christina.
With these changes, LITG has freed up time to empower employees for more forward-looking projects and exciting activities, as they are no longer tied to boring, repetitive tasks. “We will be able to gain new insights, especially in the marketing and sales area, by linking these data sources. This is particularly important for decision-making, as the data is now more credible and reliable for management,” says Christina.
"We didn't just get a provider, we feel like we’ve got a new team member - and that's how we know we’ve made the right decision."
“A big advantage of Adverity was the support and knowledge exchange we had with their teams. This was an important point for us, as we didn’t want to become database experts to get the most out of our data. The focus is on our core business, and in Adverity we’ve found an expert who understands us, helps us, and gives us advice on how to prepare and visualize our data in the best possible way,” concludes Christina Kaschnitz, Head of Controlling & Internal Audits at LITG.