How TUI stays at the forefront of data-driven innovation

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By becoming a growing, scalable and global tourism business with ambitious profitability targets, data is now more important than ever for TUI.

With a future-oriented data strategy and a modern data stack infrastructure in place, TUI is ready to embark on a journey to the next stage of their data maturity.

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TUI is one of the world's leading global tourism platform companies. Under the umbrella of the TUI Group, they cover the entire tourism value chain under one roof. This integrated offering enables TUI to provide their 21 million customers with an unmatched holiday experience in 180 regions.

The Goal

TUI Group combines over 400 owned hotels, 16 cruise ships, a digital platform for more than 160,000 tours, activities and experiences, strong tour operators, 1,200 travel agencies and leading online portals, five airlines with around 130 aircrafts, and destination services in all major holiday countries around the globe - making TUI one of the leading Travel & Tourism brands in the world.

With the right data strategy in place, TUI aims to achieve higher levels of data maturity over time so that they can unlock the true potential and value of their data more and more.

Data as a driver for growth

The ambitions for growth, scalability and high profitability require TUI as an organisation to stay at the forefront of data-driven innovation and decision making.

Trusted data at the center

Trusted data is therefore at the heart of TUI’s great customer experiences and maximized commercial performance. It drives the solutions TUI creates to find a fit for all markets & domains, whilst continuously driving added value for customers, employees and the industry.

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The Challenge

"We don't do stupid things at TUI" - is a mantra TUI team members live by. This means they are experts in their field and outsource whatever is not their core competence to others that are experts in that particular field.

The Common Analytics Department was facing extreme staff shortage, with simply no way to run and maintain a secure and highly available Tableau server cluster when TUI decided to migrate from their legacy solution to Tableau. Sticking to their mantra, TUI found a trusted partner in Biztory for server management, training and additional support.

The first main challenge immediately became clear: How should TUI deal with the intentionally created data chaos? When TUI first introduced Tableau, the onboarding and training was mainly focused on maximum freedom for the analysts to create a hype for new ways of working and exciting functionality Tableau brought compared to the legacy tool. After two years of scaling the Tableau community at TUI, this lead to great adoption & growth, but also a significant increase in duplicated data sources and therefore not the most ideal use of server resources.

In order to scale the analytics operations and move to a higher level of data maturity, things needed to change.

Accelerating the TUI Data Journey

To tackle their data challenge, Biztory helped TUI in designing a data steward programme. With suitable reports, an automatic clean-up tool utilising the different APIs Tableau offers, and new processes, the server soon became tidy and performant again.

Modern Data Infrastructure

By implementing a Modern Data Infrastructure, TUI is now more than ever ready to scale data-driven innovations & decision making throughout the business.

Trusted Data Partner

Acting as a trusted partner, Biztory still works closely together with Tableau Premium Support to handle Server management and administration for TUI.

Training & Enablement

As an extension to the team at TUI, Biztory offers regular training, doctor sessions and flexible consultancy to continuously improve the level of data maturity at TUI.

"Biztory was of enormous value in designing a data steward programme to tackle our internal data challenge. In the first 2 years the focus was on adoption and growth. With as little governance as possible we onboarded users to Tableau rapidly, knowing that this would lead to a lot of data duplication and stale content. Together with Biztory consultants we developed a clear strategy to tackle this intentional chaos, implemented automated processes for clean-up, and right-sized our server cluster to cost cautiously future proof it."

Julian Reese, Tableau, Spotfire & Alteryx Technology Team Lead at TUI

Success factors...

Tableau as a flexible, self-service dashboarding solution

The implementation of Tableau really helped TUI build better reports with state of the art data visualisations.

Tableau offers robust data connectivity options, allowing users to connect to various data sources, from databases to cloud platforms, ensuring flexibility in data integration.

By integrating Tableau with the Snowflake Enterprise Data Warehouse in a Modern Data Stack Infrastructure, data analysts and business users can make better business decisions, easier and faster.

For everyday ETL, the broader user base at TUI can use Tableau Prep for no-code data preparation without relying heavily on a team of data engineers.

Snowflake as an Enterprise Data Warehouse built to scale

As a cloud-based data warehousing service, Snowflake fits the future-oriented, scalable data vision of TUI as an organisation.

By bringing data together from a variety of sources, Snowflake is the main platform for removing data silos.

As the Enterprise Data Warehousing solution, Snowflake enables TUI to store large amounts of data efficiently to analyse in Tableau.

With on-the-fly scalability, Snowflake can handle varying workloads with different compute and storage needs. Meaning TUI can scale up or down instantly without downtime, paying only for the compute and storage they use.

Data Transformation & Automation with dbt & Airflow

Data transformation and automation are two other crucial components in the TUI modern data stack, enabling users to efficiently prepare, process, and manage data for analytics and business intelligence.

As an open-source tool, dbt allows data analysts and engineers to transform data directly in the Snowflake Enterprise Data Warehouse more efficiently.

By combining dbt with Airflow, TUI can define tasks and dependencies in Python, making it highly flexible and capable of creating robust, scalable, and automated data transformation pipelines that ensure data is always trustworthy, and ready for analysis & decision-making.