Global luxury hotel performance reports delivered in 2 hours instead of 10 days
Migration to Tableau Cloud led to internal operational cost savings
Adoption program supported by Actinvision & in-house Tableau community
Accor offers the largest brand portfolio in the hotel industry, comprised of internationally acclaimed luxury and premium brands as well as popular midscale and economy brands.
In 2015, Accor Luxury and Premium brands acquired FRHI Hotels & Resorts (Fairmont, Raffles, and Swissotel), significantly extending its presence in the luxury and premium segment. At the time of the acquisition, each of the 100+ hotels were operating its own set of manual data reports, taking a lot of time and resources to maintain.
In this interview, filmed onsite in their Paris offices, Geoffray Maugin, SVP Global Guest Experience & Business Performance, and Nicolas Leseurre, Director of Planning and Analytics, discuss how Tableau Cloud (powered by AWS) has helped to improve business decisions and data accessibility throughout the Luxury and Premium brands division.
Geoffray, can you tell us a little bit about Accor Luxury and Premium Brands and the importance of accurate data insights?
Accor is a global hotel management company, boasting an extensive portfolio of nine world-class brands and over 600 hotels. In order to effectively manage such a large and diverse group, we need equally world-class dashboards that enable our hotels to drive activity, improve quality and promote customer loyalty wherever possible. As such, access to fast, accurate data insights is key.
This is especially true in Luxury and Premium brands, where customer loyalty is so crucial. This high-end segment is very important when it comes to uncovering in-depth insights and delivering a level of service that elevates our brands above those of our competitors.
Nicolas, can you talk us through the start of your Tableau journey and the main challenges you encountered?
Our journey began with the acquisition of three iconic hotel brands - Fairmont Hotels, Raffle Hotels & Swissotel. As part of the integration process, we took over a series of reporting activities for these new hotels and quickly identified a series of problems. Primarily, each hotel had its own set of reports, which had to be updated manually. With over 100 hotel properties involved, this added up to a significant number of reports!
Not only did the volume lead to excessive running costs and reporting delays, but the high risk of errors during the manual updating process was causing a lot of dissatisfaction amongst end-users.
Centralizing everything through Tableau Cloud quickly led to dramatic improvements. Time spent updating and delivering reports dropped from 10 days to just two hours.
Nicolas, how did migrating to Tableau Cloud help you solve these issues?
Centralizing everything through Tableau Cloud quickly led to dramatic improvements. Time spent updating and delivering reports dropped from 10 days to just two hours. We also used Tableau Bridge (which allows dashboards published to Tableau Cloud to maintain live connections to any data sources behind a firewall) to create a single reporting process for all hotels, further increasing its impact throughout the company.
Our end users now have fast, easy access to a wide range of diversified KPIs in Tableau Cloud, giving them a 360-degree view of everything in a single location, as opposed to multiple platforms.
We have also used Tableau Cloud’s extensive functionality to revamp the guiding principles of all our reports, allowing us to use visualizations to tell stories between different dashboards.
Geoffray, what kind of impact has this had across Accor Luxury and Premium brands?
We have already managed to unify data as diverse as Financials, Quality, Distribution, and Social Media through Tableau Cloud. Soon, we will add data sources from other business areas such as Sustainable Development, Loyalty or Food & Beverage. The consolidated views at the country, regional, brand and global levels help us to drive better performance across the board, which is huge.
User feedback has also been very positive, both at the hotel level and at the corporate brand level. Everyone loves Tableau’s highly visual approach and how easy it is to filter information to find exactly what they’re looking for.
You’ve now successfully deployed Tableau Cloud across hundreds of Accor Luxury and Premium brands hotels around the world. Geoffray, what do you think has been the key to your success?
The more people we have using Tableau Cloud, the more effective it becomes throughout the business. As such, user buy-in is absolutely critical. To help us in this process, we ran a series of comprehensive training webinars with end-users explaining how to use Tableau Cloud effectively and what they can find within each of the dashboards and reports.
A key benefit of Tableau Cloud is that it tracks user activity, which allows me to check who has connected to it and what reports they have viewed. I can then follow up with users individually and make sure they get the information they need. If not, I can show them how to do it so they know for the future.
Nicolas, can you tell us what key factors made you choose Tableau Cloud?
Firstly, the agility of the platform. You can start with raw data that you’ve just collected and quickly turn it into rich visualizations that enable fast, intuitive analytics.
Secondly, the ease of use of the platform. In just a few days users can go from being complete novices to creating high-level dashboards and visualizations all by themselves.
Thirdly, the partners working with Tableau. Thanks to the support from Actinvision we quickly reached our reporting and analytics targets, learning a great deal along the way.
Finally, the community. Tableau is supported by a passionate, friendly online community around the world. This means we have access to expert knowledge and information whenever we need it, helping ensure our data analytics goals can always be achieved.