Jet2 is British, leisure airline that also provides convenient, affordable holiday packages. An initial project with Tableau was analyzing Jet2’s partnerships with hotels to ensure that they were serving customers’ needs. When Tableau expanded to the revenue team, they had a “eureka moment” because they could visualize data that was previously difficult to access. Today with help from Tableau, departments at Jet2 use data to collaborate more effectively and work together to develop solutions. As Andrew Aucott, General Manager of Business Intelligence comments, Tableau will continue to “change the way [they] work.”
Tableau: How do you use data at Jet2? Andrew Aucott, General Manager of Business Intelligence: We are, fundamentally, a leisure travel business. We use data for everything from finance to revenue management to customer operations. It underpins everything that we do in the organization. Tableau: How does Tableau fit in? Andrew: One of the initial projects that we have set up with Tableau is to analyze how we contract against hotels at certain destinations that we fly to. By using Tableau, we've been able to see the contracts that we currently have that we would have previously not been able to see and see how they're related to our customer needs—and hopefully improve what the customer wants. So it gives us the ability to be able to see where we are doing well, where we've done a good job of this year, and it lets us see into the future what we would contract.
Tableau gives us the ability to work together on the solution and then collaborate more effectively as we're building it.
Tableau: What problems were you facing before Tableau? Andrew: I think one of the problems that we had before— one of the reasons that we looked at Tableau is because we were, effectively, serving data mostly through Excel pivot tables. The way that we used to work with Excel and the limitations around that, the business would come to us with a set of requirements. And it just wasn't efficient because we'd be building something that actually didn't turn out to be what they wanted when they saw it. Tableau: Have you seen more collaboration since implementing Tableau? Andrew: I think some of the best ways to inspire people is to actually show them the product. So I frequently hold sessions around Tableau and how we can use it, show examples of our data to get people engaged with it and show them the power of what it can do. Tableau gives us the ability to work together on the solution and then collaborate more effectively as we're building it, and that will, ultimately, give them what they need in the end. Tableau: How have you improved data visibility since introducing Tableau? Andrew: I think in terms of productivity enhancements, in terms of the speed to insight, in terms of actually taking a set of data around a particular problem—putting that together and showing that in Tableau was something that we haven't been able to do in the past. We've been able to analyze that data, and that certainly told us things that we previously have not seen. That's been a massive improvement to the way that we work, and it will make a huge difference to the way we work going forward. I think it will change the way we work and it will enable us to collaborate much, much better in the future. I think it will change the way that we do analysis within the company. Tableau: What other departments use Tableau at Jet2? What was their reaction to the software? Andrew: There was one particular meeting that I remember where the revenue team saw the two and there was a bit of a Eureka moment, really, when they saw it. And that led to them really wanting to learn more about the product. Tableau: What other benefits have you experienced? Andrew: We were giving people access to data, essentially. And it was pretty uncontrolled. So what Tableau really gives us is the ability to have some control over the consistency and how that information is used. And I think that flexibility resonated with the revenue teams and they appreciated the benefits of working in that way.