Travel, Transportation and Logistics Solutions

Introduction and Overview

We travel for leisure and business. And we have high expectations in terms of personalization and real-time updates about all aspects of our trips. If you work in a travel or transportation company, understanding and optimizing the customer journey will likely be a priority. There are opportunities to improve customer loyalty and increase spending prior to, during, and after the trip.

We travel in an increasingly digital environment sharing data and producing data along with the equipment we travel in and the environments we travel through. This creates many opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and the bottom line. Customers are looking for simplicity and convenience and are happy to manage their journeys without too much human interaction. Spotfire® tools allow you to implement a wide variety of solutions to transform customer and operational processes in Travel and Transportation. This article will provide you with specific examples. 

Our software products are used by many companies in Travel related industries: Airlines, Train Companies, Travel Agencies, Entertainment Companies, Hotel Chains, and Booking Sites, to name a few. 

Besides the transportation of people, we will also cover some cargo and parcel transportation and logistics examples.

Some of the key Spotfire® capabilities and use cases relevant to Travel include:

• Ad-hoc data discovery with interactive visualizations and point-click statistics
• Integrate machine learning into dashboards
• Big Data analysis via Spark, Hadoop, and other connectors
• Geo-analytics capabilities to assist with map and schematic analysis
• Natural Language Generation to customize and automate high-quality insights
• IoT Connected Intelligence Platform combining Spotfire® and Spotfire® Streaming to turn insights into action

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Travel and Transportation use-cases

Click here to download a white paper titled: Airline Customer Loyalty and Improving Your Bottom Line with Data You Already Have

Operational Efficiency

In the example of flight analytics, smart airports and smart airplanes produce data that can be analyzed and used to improve operational efficiencies such as routes, speed, and altitude allocation of assets or fuel efficiency. This can be done in batch and in real-time with sensor data. These opportunities apply not only to airlines but to all other transportation types such as buses, trains, and container ships. Predictive Analytics plays an important role in these use cases as well as Mapping and Geo-Analytics capabilities. 3D Flight visualizations through integration with Cesium JS for example are possible with Spotfire®.

Ground Operations

Travel hubs such as Airports and Train stations have significant challenges in managing peak times and disruptions. The flow of people needs to be managed, bags need to be transported to the right aircraft, shops and restaurants need to be open for business when needed, the crew needs to be allocated to where they are most needed, and security procedures need to be in place. Any of these and many more operational and customer processes can be monitored, analyzed, and optimized. As more data is shared and combined between various companies delivering services, the ability to anticipate and take advantage of opportunities to improve services or increase retail sales increases. Advanced analytics techniques can also help anticipate and reduce disruptions such as reducing the number of lost baggage or avoiding delays as a result of insufficient equipment or personnel. 

Connected Vehicles, IoT

The Connected Vehicles Accelerator is a Spotfire®-engineered, open-source fast-start for systems that algorithmically manage connected vehicles. It contains components to allow tracking of vehicles based on the GTFS format for transit vehicles. It includes components for visualization of real-time moving vehicles, rules to detect delays and classify occupancy, the ability to monitor terminal and platform contention delays, it can provide alerting and notifications, provide scheduling and staff allocation, and integration components to link all of them together. These use cases are not only applicable to airplanes, buses, and trains but to any asset that needs to be tracked and traced for example packages in the parcel industry.

Health & Safety

For Health & Safety management, understanding of root-causes of employee injuries and being able to address them can reduce the number of injuries and save significant costs. Visualization of the data enables understanding of the risk and can be used to educate the teams and help with targets to achieve.

Manufacturing and Maintenance

Airplanes, Helicopters, and Trains are complex to build and will need to meet rigorous quality standards. Monitoring and optimizing the manufacturing process and quality control have many aspects and if understood and optimized can result in reduced production time, reduced inventories, higher customer satisfaction, and lower costs. Visual overviews of production status or defects will help engineers understand where to focus their work. 

Predictive Maintenance is applied to avoid unnecessary maintenance and to initiate necessary maintenance when it is actually needed based on current information on leading indicators for breakdown. 

Customer Analytics

Customer Analytics for the travel industry is about understanding the customer journey. And increasing your Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is a measure of the overall loyalty of your customers to your company. By combining different datasets and using historic and real-time information, you can find opportunities to delight the customer with service and relevant offers. As well as updates on disruptions and personalized communication which, if done well, will increase customer loyalty and spending. In this area of customer analytics, we also use machine learning and techniques such as sentiment analysis, clustering, affinity analysis, and propensity analysis.

Sales and Marketing

Price comparison sites are prevalent in the Travel industry. Real-time pricing solutions give companies a competitive edge by providing optimum quotes considering customer profiles as well as competition and regulatory requirements. With the increasing % of online bookings, A/B testing for many aspects of marketing will be possible and when executed well, can be a fast and inexpensive way of doing market research. For example to see which campaign is most effective in which regions or for which season, brand, or customer profile. 

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