How TUI Mastered Data Management with Directus

[Directus] has made it possible for us to solve a number of business problems, and the solutions save our colleagues a lot of time and hassle.

— Dr. Michael Schäfers, Senior Data Engineer

Hotels deal with a lot of data – from hotel bookings to dinner reservations, ratings and reviews, occupancy rates and more.

Keeping track of and reporting on that data can be extremely challenging, since data can come from a wide range of digital and paper-based sources.

Solving this challenge drove Senior Data Engineers Michael Schäfers and Alexander Fabig at the TUI Group to make Directus a part of their long term strategy for improving how they gather, manage and share data with their business colleagues. 

Data was coming from everywhere, in many formats

The TUI Group is one of the world's leading travel and tourism companies, with about 60,000 employees operating airlines, travel agencies, hotels and cruise ships.

Michael and Alexander work in the hotels side of the business, which has a portfolio of about 420 hotels under management. They handle the data and analytics activities for all departments in this business unit, from operations to customer relations, IT security and others. 

“We focus on serving the data to our colleagues, so that they can report on financial numbers, hotel occupancy, reservations, customer statistics and other key business metrics,” Alexander said.

Prior to implementing Directus, Michael and Alexander were collecting data from various sources, including reservation systems, customer management systems, ad hoc Excel spreadsheets and other sources – and feeding the data into a large Snowflake database.

From there, they generated dashboards and reports for the different departments. 

“Sometimes data would come from the minds of employees, Excel or CSV files on Sharepoint, or even in an email, and we had to transfer all that data into Snowflake manually,” Michael said, adding that this caused formatting issues and errors. “We needed a master data management tool.” 

Powerful API, open approach 

Having researched and evaluated a number of closed and open-source tools, they were intrigued by the idea of using Directus as a Backend-as-a-Service solution for multiple use cases.

They were impressed with the powerful Directus API and its ability to connect to any relational database. 

Data modeling capabilities also stood out, as well as Directus Automate and the ability to trigger actions from a collection. The data flow is bi-directional, and using the API is safer in terms of data integrity and security.

The fact that Directus is entirely open source was also a differentiator.

“We really appreciate the open source approach Directus takes,” Michael said. “We are always happy if we submit a support ticket and we can see that the bug is recorded in Github and changes are being made to the code as a result,” Michael said. “That level of transparency is missing from other software vendors.”

One platform, many use cases

The first use case for Directus was a digital tracking solution for fitness trainers working at TUI hotels, which would enable them to keep track of their class schedules and participants.

The system leverages the Directus API together with AWS components to enable these non-technical users to enter information about their courses themselves. 

Enabling the trainers to enter the data on their own eliminated the need for Michael and Alexander to manually enter it, while providing more immediate access to reports and metrics about the classes.

“The fitness trainers just enter the number of participants and other class updates, and everything is updated automatically,” Michael said. 

Another use case involves the Controlling department, which needs to create and view reports showing the bookings at TUI hotels.

The team used Directus to enable custom filters, such as results for only new hotels, enabling a higher degree of granularity in the report results.

Michael said that Directus eliminates potential errors because the system they built references collections to ensure data consistency, for example with hotel names.

“Directus has definitely improved our data quality for these use cases,” he said.

“The API is very helpful for data mapping and communicating with our business colleagues. They can simply log into Directus and see automatically if there’s new data to review, edit or categorize, without our intervention.” 

Michael said that creating these systems would have been impossible without Directus.

“We are not application developers,” he said. “Without Directus, we would have to implement a login system with access controls, take care of the backend and the frontend, and maybe use some web libraries – and we’re really not comfortable doing this kind of work. I think I wouldn't even have had the idea to build these solutions without Directus."

A versatile platform for future projects

Since adopting Directus, Michael and Alexander have also found that the platform offers more capabilities than they were aware of originally, so they’re looking to use the tool more frequently.

For example, TUI’s Quality Management team may benefit with a solution for managing review data and content, and Directus fits the bill. 

“Every month, the Quality team manually reviews ratings in Excel spreadsheets and compares the data with target metrics before sending the results to hotel management,” Michael said.

“Automating this workflow using Directus will be much more efficient.”

The team attributes their ability to leverage Directus for these varied use cases to the platform’s openness – as well as the willingness of the Directus staff and community to help them solve their business challenges.

“I’ve never seen a solution that is so open, where I can get to the data of the API and the data tables so easily,” Alexander said. “Even our communication with Directus employees and the transparency we have when addressing issues is very open.”

But the time savings and efficiency Directus has enabled makes all the difference to Michael and Alexander’s lean Data Engineering team.

“Do you know how many extra hours per week we had in the past before Directus?” Alexander asked.

“It doesn’t matter anymore, because that's all gone."

Master your data management with Directus.