Customer Spotlight: Data-Driven Decisions in the Sky
Qlik offers Ryanair a holistic platform that allows the customer experience to take-off.
Founded in 1985 with only 25 staff members, Ryanair’s story is one of exceptional growth. Today, as Europe’s most popular and affordable airline, Ryanair is responsible for executing over 1,800 daily flights from 85 bases, utilizing a fleet of over 360 Boeing 737 aircrafts across 200 airports, and spanning 33 countries in both Europe and North Africa.
In order to continue offering low-cost flight options to 200 destinations around the region, Ryanair continually works to improve its customer experience.
To do this, the team at Ryanair knew the answer lay in effective data management. They needed to increase visibility of actionable data based on its daily business operations. The airline wanted to ramp up the business to be ‘digital-led’ with the likes of Ryanair Labs to establish a total holistic business—from booking to check-in to travel, hotels, cars, and taxis—as an end-to-end and packaged online experience for customers. Shane Finnegan, Senior BI Developer at Ryanair spoke to the flexibility required by Ryanair:
“Different audiences wanted to consume their [flight] data in different ways. We wanted a platform that would allow us to meet these differing needs.”
The Qlik platform is helping the airline meet consumer needs. Ryanair began using Qlik in 2015 with an initial app in QlikView used for finance, tracking revenue, route profitability; and as a ‘proof point’ for BI/analytics within the organization. This app is for in-depth analytics within the finance and marketing departments.
“With Qlik, we’re building a complete overview of what’s going on across the business and it is playing a major role in the way we are evolving the services we offer to customers. Ultimately, we want to find the best ways to make our customers happy on-board, while being able to offer them the lowest fares on the market – and Qlik gives us the foundation to make educated decisions which will make that notion a reality.” – Finnegan
By utilizing Qlik, the airline’s BI team has consolidated data from across the organization to drive insights, visualize analytics and make informed business decisions; complementing the airlines continued expansion and commitment to customer satisfaction. Moving forward, Ryanair plans to continuously improve their in-flight retail offering and optimize the supply chain by understanding the anticipated passenger mix on any given flight, and matching this with an appropriate range of products and stock for the flight.