Traveloka is Southeast Asia’s leading travel platform. Headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia, their mission is to provide an all-in-one stop for travelers and adventurers, giving them the ability to book flights, transportation, accommodation, local attractions and much more in a single app. With over 10 years of operation and over 114 million downloads, Traveloka allows travelers of diverse backgrounds and interests to both discover and book their memorable travel experiences while encouraging them to “experience life, your way.”

Data Proliferation and the Move to Centralized Business Intelligence

Traveloka’s business relies heavily on data. With 24/7 availability, their app never sleeps, which means they need relevant and reliable data at their fingertips to make better decisions and effectively serve their users. Up until 2018, Traveloka was using multiple business intelligence (BI) tools across different groups for different use cases, which posed challenges as they continued to scale.

More than 60% of their employees actively use the BI tools and they often need to login to more than one application on a weekly basis for different use cases. Traveloka found that it was challenging for their internal teams to find relevant data, which inevitably led to different groups using different metrics, definitions, data sets or versions of the same data reports.

Traveloka recognized the need for a better system and better tools, so they made the decision to consolidate their BI functions into a centralized team. The first order of business for this team was to migrate their analytics stack to a cloud platform, then subsequently phase out the multiple BI tools used across the organization. In seeking a BI platform that could easily connect and integrate across their stack and provide value across a variety of use cases, they landed on Tableau Software.

The Many Analytics Use Cases for Tableau

Since 2018, Traveloka’s use of Tableau has grown incredibly, and they’ve migrated most business intelligence use cases to Tableau. The Tableau dashboards help to monitor KPIs, understand the business trends and unlock key insights across different teams from product, business development and customer care.

The most immediate use case for Tableau was monitoring sales across different business functions, products and regions. This is especially useful as Traveloka often runs multiple promotional campaigns across their products. Tableau enables them to measure those campaigns and make an informed decision on the success of each campaign and decide what campaigns they might run in the future. That fine grained understanding of product performance at any given moment helps them operate more efficiently.

Zooming in on the product performance aspect, Tableau’s utility has gone even deeper. The historical challenge with comparing performance of different products at Traveloka is that each product has different performance metrics. These additional steps of access and consistency made it less efficient to put together any clear global picture of product performance. This all changed with the creation of the Common View dashboard in Tableau.

Traveloka’s Common View dashboard gives senior management a single view of product performance across the organization with unified KPIs to easily create comparisons of different products. Traveloka also made access to these insights an automated process by connecting Tableau to their corporate Slack instance. All senior management has to do when they see that dashboard in Slack is click a button, and they have a high-level view of product performance across the organization.

The Common View dashboard is useful in itself, but it became invaluable with the advent of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Since Traveloka operates across several different countries in Southeast Asia, access to timely insights on whether government restrictions or other factors in a specific country are affecting product performance or operations was key. This level of timely and reliable insight helped Traveloka to react and adapt quickly to the changing landscape of COVID-19 and to provide a better user experience for their customers.

Traveloka hasn’t only used Tableau to measure product performance internally; it’s also helped them analyze product performance across the market, especially regarding price competitiveness. A great example is flight prices. Thanks to detailed inventory and price monitoring through Tableau, Traveloka can react more effectively to demand spikes and other events, like working with partners. Yet another key area where Tableau has transformed Traveloka’s operations is with their agents. Traveloka employs hundreds of agents who help customers with needs ranging from booking requests to support, ensuring a seamless experience for our customer. A record of each interaction is logged within Salesforce Service Cloud, which connects directly to a Tableau dashboard that shows agent productivity across the board. With rapidly refreshing data, agents can see exactly where they stand in relation to their peers when it comes to number of calls, customer queries solved and more.

Supporting a Rapidly Growing Tableau Community

Traveloka has excelled with Tableau in a relatively short amount of time, through a global pandemic no less. This is thanks to their clear vision for analytics as well as support from their organization. Helping them along the way in the background has been the InterWorks team. When Traveloka first explored Tableau, the teams at Tableau and Salesforce connected them to InterWorks for a proof-of-concept to demonstrate Tableau’s value on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

To sustain Traveloka’s success with Tableau well into the future, InterWorks onboarded them into InterWorks PRO. This gave them access to Assist by InterWorks – a Tableau and data expert helpline – as well as regular custom workshops for Traveloka’s growing Tableau user base. After deploying their Tableau Server instance, Traveloka also signed up for ServerCare by InterWorks – a comprehensive Tableau Server monitoring and maintenance service run by InterWorks’ dedicated team of server specialists. The biggest benefit of ServerCare is that it allows Traveloka to focus on proactive dashboard development and user upskilling instead of rote server maintenance and performance tuning, resulting in countless admin hours saved.

The biggest testament to Traveloka’s success in adopting Tableau is their vibrant Tableau user group, run by the centralized BI team. This user group meets regularly to discuss new Tableau features or to focus on timely topics, and each sharing session attracts over 100 Tableau users across the organization. This level of user buy-in shows just how invaluable Tableau is across the company. This continuing education also allows Traveloka to utilize Tableau in increasingly useful ways, be it digging deeper into specific insights or uncovering new use cases to help the business become more profitable or efficient.

Ultimately, Traveloka made the wise decision to invest in the right tools and the right people, creating a data-driven culture to provide products and services that focus on customer-centricity. Whatever exciting new horizons await their business in the future, they have the established framework, relevant data and talent they need to give them the strong advantages to keep competing as Southeast Asia’s leading travel platform.