The Travel Corporation gains business insight through master data management

Expanding travel firm consolidates disparate data to gain a single view of its customers

International travel group The Travel Corporation has carried out a master data management (MDM) project that allows the firm to scrutinise performance reports and return meaningful metrics, as well as improve communications with customers.

The group, which has over 25 brands ranging from luxury hotels and boutique river cruise ships to niche tour operators, implemented technology from DataFlux to support an ongoing data cleansing and governance effort to improve the quality of data management within the organisation.

"The group has grown through acquisition and because each brand that was bought has its own systems and databases, we had to create a central repository with customer information, travel information, travel agent information and so on," explained Alan Cox, director of information management systems at Trafalgar, one of the group's brands.

He said that a key driver for the project was the need to bring disparate data together and be able to analyse it.

"All of that has now been combined into one huge repository giving us the Holy Grail: the single view of the customer," he said.

The group sought advice from DataFlux, which provided it with a data governance framework. This necessitated the appointment of a data cleansing team to comb all data and reformat it, and a "data steward" to effectively police the policies on data across the organisation.

"We introduced a set of standards and guidelines; do's and don'ts for entering data. Examples would be not entering someone's extension number in the first name field, but instead just write the first name. It sounds simple, but up until we set up this initiative data was not being entered properly," said Cox.

He added that the IT department needed to approach senior management in order to fund the project and put together a compelling business case outlining tangible benefits.

"We now have the ability to view data on individual travel agencies, agents or passengers and we can run a reports to see things like our top 200 selling agents in the US. We couldn't do that before because the data quality was so poor," explained Cox.

"We can pull together that information in a relational database. So if we recognise that you're a customer, we can give your information to the agency and the agent that you booked with. We can send out communications to that customer, then refer any details on them back to the agent to create a potential ongoing lead."