I spend a ridiculous amount of time in airplanes – a quarter of a million miles or so a year for the past too-long-to-admit has seen me take a very active interest in the travel industry generally, and airlines specifically. Given that I spend my days writing about technology, it’s a logical conclusion that much of my focus is on how technology can make the travel process fundamentally better.
The fact that most airline systems are disconnected and siloed, and the fact that an airline has the power to know so much more about me as a customer, points to a massive disconnect between the core systems that airlines use, and the capability that technology could bring them.
Which is why I was interested to see an announcement from the team at GoodData. GoodData is one of the new breed of analytics companies that, born in the cloud, take a lighter weight, more agile view on analytics, GoodData is reportedly used by 40,000 companies and covers the storing, combining, analysis and visualization of data. Headquartered in San Francisco and backed by a who’s who of VC firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Growth Partners and General Catalyst Partners, GoodData is often talked about as one of the big names to watch in the space.
So when the big name in cloud analytics partners with the airlines that is often called the best marketer in the industry, sparks should fly. Virgin America is apparently looking to be using GoodData to run analytics across its various digital marketing efforts. The solution is being applied across social media, online promotion, advertizing and web content. GoodData will centralize and automate the analytics process for Virgin America’s digital marketing data, from collection and integration to visualization, custom dashboards and ad hoc analysis. The idea being that by bringing together all relevant information into a single cloud-based environment and delivering a holistic view to business users, GoodData will help Virgin America’s marketing team get faster and deeper insights to make better business decisions.
Of course the partnership is an announcement and hasn’t yet been cemented by way of hard outcomes. I reached out to Virgin through the agency dealing with this story. I wanted to get their take on what it’s actually going to mean for the company, their director of digital marketing, Carl Burckhardt, made one of those quotes that sounds great but means little:
With our previous analytics system, data-driven decision making required our team to spend large portions of their time building complex reports. With GoodData, we will be able to streamline our analytics process, allowing our team to focus on more strategic initiatives
Hmmmm. This announcement could either be a really important milestone in the airline industry, or it could be a simple marketing statement that goes nowhere. I’m hoping for the former.
