“TUI’s business goals are to achieve profitable growth, obtain new customers, and make TUI the number one travel brand with our vision ‘Think Travel. Think TUI.’ This can only happen if we provide excellent service quality,” says Heinz Kreuzer, CIO of TUI Central Region and CEO of TUI InfoTec. “We really focus on innovative technology, putting it in place, and making use of it. When we do that, we meet our goals.

“Today’s TUI was formed through an M&A process, when TUI AG and TUI Travel PLC merged in December 2014, and each company came with a complete set of different applications. We had to consolidate to be able to maintain our high quality service. Using point-to-point interfaces would create too much complexity and be difficult to maintain; Therefore, an intelligent integration layer was one of the key components in our overall application architecture.”

“TUI wants to serve its customers in a very individual and unique way and provide very personalized offers based on where they are in their journey,” continues Mr. Kreuzer. “We have to be quite fast to react to customer needs, and this does not allow long development processes. We have to analyze information in real time, and as soon as we have the result, take the right action. Our internal users need to control processes and customize the system without deep IT involvement. That means that TIBCO Fast Data with real time analytics is key.

“TUI’s relationship with TIBCO started at least 12 years ago with our first consolidation. We looked at the ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™ integration technology, compared it, issued an RFP, and TIBCO was chosen. TIBCO is a very professional company, and it’s also prepared to offer, I would call it, a partnership. It’s quite a close interaction between our developers and TIBCO labs; We know the newest TIBCO technology—and if we implement it, it helps us develop our applications in a way that we can achieve our goals.

“TUI Group received a Trailblazer Award this year, and our teams are really proud. It shows they are working in a highly efficient way, in a very successful way. An already very good partnership is improving.”

Smart, Competitive, Just-right Pricing

“We use TIBCO Spotfire® to analyze competitor pricing, and we can immediately change ours so we’re very competitive without giving up too much margin. As soon as we have the results, we can’t wait, we have to adjust prices immediately; Therefore, real-time analytics and Fast Data handling is key for the success of our business.”

Market-Leading Customer Service and Experience

“Our customers benefit from TIBCO technology as we are able to provide an even better customer experience through analysis, which tells us, for example, that the guest will depart for their holidays in two days time. We can send them a text message saying, ‘In two days, your trip starts. Do you want to pre-order duty free goods? Do you want to check in now and reserve a seat? Did you think about an excursion when arriving at the resort?’ There are a lot of services we can provide based on this analysis to make the customer experience more unique.

“Customer feedback is definitely a very important measure for us, and we are quite proud that the feedback is really positive. Our net promoter score started at 41, and in a very short time, went up. We definitely want to beat that score in the near future.”

Performance and Stability for Business Building
“TIBCO technology definitely helps us speed development,” says Kreuzer. “Integrating a new system, a new application, can be done very quickly because the integration layer is stable. We can be sure of system performance, availability, and stability. We generate €50 million in revenue per day through our systems, so you can imagine the financial impact if they’re not available for just one hour.

“We want to increase our ability to use Fast Data for real-time analysis, event-driven business processes, and actions. Assume you are on a TUI holiday. It’s nice, you’re enjoying yourself, but it’s Friday, and you are expected back on Saturday morning. TUI analyzes and sees that you might stay longer because you’re flexible in terms of time. We do further analysis and find hotel availability; we find a flight back on Monday. We send you a text again, ‘Why not extend your trip? We’ve arranged everything: a room, a flight. If you say yes within the next 10 minutes, we’ll give you a 15% discount.’ Wouldn’t you do it? To do this analysis, we need more Fast Data experience. You can see where we want to move, and how important Fast Data is for our business.”