< 4
month cloud migration
7+
systems consolidated
350K+
unified member views
To create exceptional experiences, Holiday Inn Club Vacations (HICV) unified its customer data with Informatica cloud Master Data Management, Data Governance and Data Quality solutions. With a 360-degree view of every member, HICV drives greater personalization across online and offline touchpoints building long-term loyalty.
Mike Nolder: We call it a customer obsession and it's a goal that we have as a company to create extraordinary experiences with customers when they come to stay with us. Trust in our data is key. Enterprise data warehousing, master data management and data governance are the three primary focus areas that we have right now as part of our data transformation. We want to make sure that we have that common view of the customer across all of the technology stack. One of the first priorities that we had is to go to the cloud and to find an MDM solution like Customer 360 that really is cloud-ready and was ready to go within just a few months.
Tron Nicholas: Moving to a cloud solution allowed us to scale our pace and be able to ingest faster, be able to go through cleansing faster, have cleaner data and then be able to present that in an organized fashion. Having a 360-degree customer view allows us to see the customer journey from start to finish. We'll have a better grasp on our owners, our co-owners, our prospects, individuals who just stay at reservations and we'll be able to enhance their experience making sure that we have the most up-to-date information.
Mike Nolder: The ability for us to quickly ramp up and it already being ready to accept the way we wanted to do customer master data management was really impressive. The customer cloud Data Governance and Quality, which we also implemented at the same time, was also almost plug and play.
Matt Galiotto: puts everything in one space, easy to access, manage and maintain for everyone to incorporate in their efforts.
Mike Nolder: Data lineage can be very cumbersome. With CLAIRE and the capabilities in CDGC [via the Informatica Data Management Cloud], a lot of that's automated now. Being able to use natural language processing to help us to define our terms, to help them link them together from a data security standpoint, which is very big and growing, and the list of important things that we have as we gather more data, [we] want to make sure that we're protecting our customer's data.
Matt Galiotto: CLAIRE will help give us some oversight on things maybe we overlooked in the past. It'll give us different directions to go, and it'll help people see things in a different light.
Mike Nolder: We now have a single view of a customer and we can take that master record, we can connect it to all of the different transactions and put it in front of the operations. So the folks who are working at our resorts and activities, that are interacting with our guests at the front desk – those types of interactions we can now enable by putting data in front of them, helping to make that truly customer obsessed culture that we're trying to grow.
“Having a 360-degree customer view allows us to see the customer journey from start to finish. We have a better grasp on our owners, prospects and guests and can enhance their experience by making sure that we have the most up-to-date information.”
Checking in to a new era of family travel
At Holiday Inn Club Vacations (HICV), every day brings unforgettable experiences for families. With over 30 resorts across the U.S. and Mexico, the company aims to become the most loved brand in family travel, with an exciting mix of beach, lakeside, mountain and historic locations. Recognized for customer service excellence by J.D. Power, HICV understands that achieving this ambitious goal requires more than just great destinations and amenities. What’s needed is a deep understanding of each customer's unique needs and preferences – and the ability to tailor every interaction to create moments of delight.
“We call it customer obsession and it's a goal that we have as a company to create extraordinary experiences with customers when they come to stay with us,” explains Michael Nolder, Senior Director of Enterprise Data Management. “We need to make sure we’re not only collecting consistent data but sharing it across systems. If we’re not using information that we have about a customer, and showing that level of respect, it can impact our brand reputation.”
In recent years, expectations have only grown in travel and hospitality. Customers anticipate highly personalized experiences, from custom recommendations and right-fit vacation ideas to a seamless experience across online and offline channels. Simultaneously, company leadership is increasing its focus on post-resort marketing tactics to nurture and build lifetime loyalty. Meeting these evolving needs requires a customer-centric culture powered by high-quality data.
HICV's CEO gave Nolder and his enterprise data management team a clear mandate: bring customer data together in one place, ensure it's as accurate as possible and use it to fuel a new era of customer obsession and AI-powered insights.
“Informatica was the solution that fit our needs the most and what excited us most was just the ease of everything. Customer 360 was cloud-ready from the start and Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog and Cloud Data Quality, which we implemented at the same time, were nearly plug-and-play.”
Conquering data silos with cloud-ready MDM
To centralize customer data, Holiday Inn Club Vacations needed to modernize its data management infrastructure. An ongoing digital transformation had already upgraded core systems including Salesforce CRM, resort and guest management tools and payment collections software. While each system was critical for managing operations across the customer journey, they were largely siloed, making it difficult to get a common view of the customer across the technology stack.
Fragmented data meant more work for Nolder’s team as data quality issues had to be manually identified and resolved across different systems to avoid the risk of misguided customer communications. Establishing data lineage across systems and workflows proved especially cumbersome. There were also significant technical limitations of the legacy MDM solution. Tron Nicholas, HICV's MDM Product Manager, explains: "With an on-prem system, we were limited in our ability to ingest data and the frequency and pace at which we could move it. We also had duplicate contacts across different source systems.”
These challenges made it difficult to deliver the real-time, personalized experiences that customers increasingly expected. As a result, Nolder and his team set out to find a new MDM solution that could deliver a single, 360-degree view of each customer and help automate data governance and security processes, all within a cloud-native architecture that could scale with the business.
After evaluating multiple options, HICV chose Informatica MDM Customer 360 SaaS solution, part of the Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). “Informatica was the solution that fit our needs the most and what excited us most was just the ease of everything,” explains Nolder. “Customer 360 was cloud-ready from the start and IDMC Cloud Data Governance and Catalog and Cloud Data Quality, which we implemented at the same time, were nearly plug-and-play.”
Using the Informatica cloud-native MDM solution, the team could rapidly implement a 360-degree view of its 350,000 plus member-owners and start driving value in a matter of months. Most of that implementation time was focused on rigorous testing and business stakeholder reviews with IDMC low- and no-code integration capabilities removing virtually all development and coding work.
An AI-powered customer data foundation
Modernizing with Informatica has helped Holiday Inn Club Vacations simplify its data architecture. Nolder’s team consolidated customer data from seven main systems into one MDM platform. The cloud solution allows HICV to scale the pace of data ingestion, using IDMC MDM services to apply data quality rules and merge duplicate entities into trusted profiles. Automated data governance and observability processes further reduce the team’s manual effort. As Matthew Galiotto, Data Governance IT Manager, explains: “Informatica data profiling helps us automate data quality rules and see where we have issues in our legacy systems so we can fix those as we migrate to the new path.”
HICV also gains major efficiencies from Informatica AI-powered capabilities, including metadata intelligence. “With CLAIRE, we can automate a lot of cumbersome data lineage work,” says Nolder. “Natural language processing in CLAIRE GPT will help teams define terms and link them together while protecting our customers’ data from a security standpoint.”
Informatica CLAIRE copilot offers value to even the company’s most tenured staff. As Galiotto notes: “CLAIRE provides oversight on things we may have overlooked in the past. It gives us different directions to consider and helps people that have been here building reports for years to see things in a new light.”
The future of data-driven hospitality
Holiday Inn Club Vacations is already benefiting from the Informatica cloud-based data management solution. The flexible cloud architecture of MDM and IDMC ensures that trusted member profiles are readily made available for downstream applications and services while mitigating policy and compliance risks. “Having a 360-degree customer view allows us to see the customer journey from start to finish,” says Nicholas. “We have a better grasp on our owners, prospects and guests and can enhance their experience by making sure that we have the most up-to-date information.”
Next on the roadmap, Nolder and his team are exploring new ways to bring data and AI together to drive customer obsession, including real-time MDM streams. “The efficiency of bringing our data together into a single, enterprise view for our business stakeholders was a big win with Informatica,” says Nolder. “We can take that master record, connect it to all the different transactions a customer has with us and put that in front of the folks who are working at the resort or interacting with guests at the front desk which helps to make that truly customer obsessed culture that we’re trying to grow.”
With an intelligent, scalable and trusted data management foundation, Holiday Inn Club Vacations has set the stage to bring their data and AI to life. The project has even earned Nolder’s team some lofty internal accolades with many claiming it as the most successful IT project in HICV’s 40-year history. The team is ready to push the boundaries of hospitality innovation while providing a one-of-a-kind vacation experience for every family.
Inside the solution
Cloud Data Quality
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