Customising HubSpot to manage groups

Sunsail and The Moorings are Travelopia’s yacht brands offering sailing holidays and yacht charters across the globe.

A short interview with the client

Video transcript

Adrian Sprake, Head of Data Management, Travelopia Marine:
"HubSpot was basically being used as a glorified email system. I think you've opened our eyes to the art of the possible!

My name's Adrian Sprake and the brands that I work on are Sunsail and....

Continue reading transcript

....The Moorings. You can hire your own yacht or you can hire a yacht with a crew or with a skipper. And we've got 26 locations around the world where you can sail with us.

The first project that we came to you guys with was...We ask all our customers going on yacht charters to fill out a guest list. We need to know the names and details of the guests who are going to be on the trip.

So originally this was managed via a Drupal form and we didn't have the know-how to pull this into a HubSpot-based process, which is why we initially reached out to HubSpot themselves, and [Attacat] were one of the three agencies they recommended.

It was fairly obvious from the initial meeting we had with Ruairidh and Austin that you guys got what we were trying to achieve. Even the progress we've made during the first call made us pretty comfortable that [Attacat] would be able to deliver what we're after.

Ultimately, there is an awful lot of paperwork to fill out before you go on a yacht charter holiday. If you can imagine, you've got to sign your terms and conditions, you've got to fill out your crew list, you've got to watch your health and safety briefings, you've got to order your provisions...pay your balance, you've got to watch a chart briefing. There's 10 to 12 different steps depending on the type of holiday you are going on. And so you are flooded with paperwork before you go. And it's a lot easier to manage that if it's all in HubSpot. Anything we can do to move towards a completely contained HubSpot solution is ultimately going to make it easier on the passengers and get them out on the water as quickly as possible.

And we're certainly getting there with help from you guys.

From a project management side of things, Attacat have been completely on point, from the sort of weekly standups to the weekly update reports that we can share with the rest of the business, the responsiveness to the Slack channel, whether it's contacting the project manager or even the developer directly, you guys have been great. Nothing's been too much trouble to be honest.

If anyone was, on the cusp of speaking to you guys about using your services for help with whatever issues they've got with HubSpot, I'd recommend they pick up the phone because it would become fairly obvious from the first conversation they have with you that you guys know what you're at and you can provide an easy to understand solution that people can take on board and think, yeah, we can work with these guys.

Book your free discovery call >

The full story

Introduction

Travelopia had identified HubSpot as the right tool for raising the level of its marketing and customer experience. Having been introduced to Attacat by HubSpot, a staged approach of adoption was agreed upon, starting with their “additional guest information” process.

The challenge

If you’ve ever organised a group holiday, you’ll have a little bit of insight into how much information and coordination you need to do between your group and the tour operator. Passport numbers, flight times, names and addresses are just the start. With sailing holidays, you have all that, plus extra layers of qualification checking, safety briefings, equipment options and food and drink orders to deal with. It’s a huge amount of collation and chasing work for the group organiser and likewise for the customer services and on-the-ground operations teams.

Making this whole process as easy as possible for the group organiser was identified as a brilliant place to start Travelopia’s HubSpot journey. It would not only save time operationally, it would also capture additional information, not least the group participants’ details, that could be used for marketing and most importantly, improving the overall experience. When clients are spending a lot of money, it's important that the level of service matches.

The approach

The “additional guest information” process is pretty complex with a lot of edge cases. It was agreed early on to find the core customer journeys and build a product within HubSpot to handle those. The edge cases (for example, different friends for different parts of the holiday) could initially be handled via manual input, then codified in HubSpot over time.

Discovery process

Requirements were gathered as a team with the Head of Data Management, the IT director, the operations manager and the pre-departure team. As guests would access the process from within the website’s “my account”, we also needed to liaise with the responsible offshore development team as each additional guest would require the automatic creation of an account on that system.

Implementing and integrating

By using HubSpot's highly customisable data schema, the heavy lifting of the process could all be handled by HubSpot forms and workflows. A custom object was used to handle additional guests, as many people take multiple holidays over time.

Adding custom code to HubSpot forms made them more dynamic to give the feel of an application to the customer - for example, the lead booker would be served the correct number of fields to provide the email addresses of each of their guests over the age of 16 and a responsible adult name for any guest who was 16 or under. (HubSpot associations enabled us to create the link in the schema between the children and their guardian.)

Workflows could then be used to automate follow-up and operations processes including providing the on-the-ground operations team with printable PDF provisioning checklists for preparing the boats, to meet the individual preferences of the guests, ahead of their arrival.

Training and user adoption

The new system automated much of the work that was done previously, so the staff training and adoption in this case was more about what no longer needed to be done, rather than the team having to learn a new software system. The more important bit was monitoring how the customers got on with the new system.

Ongoing support and implementation

A post-launch support phase ensured the system met the intended purpose and was stable. Ongoing support continues to enable tweaks and additional user training to be done. Periodically, additional projects are agreed to extend the functionality. This has included:

Extending the functionality to make it available to travel agents in a way that allows them to protect their customers' marketing details from Sunsail/The Moorings.
Capturing additional information for skippered charters, including food and drink, mealtime and activity preferences.
Adding additional languages

The results

Being able to source information directly from all the guests, rather than just the lead booker, has increased the accuracy of the information being collected. That in turn has made it much simpler for the teams on the ground to deliver the service and ultimately get clients out onto the water faster.

For the lead booker, the amount of paperwork has been cut dramatically. Travelopia can now assist by doing all the chasing up of the additional guests, rather than it all falling on the lead booker’s shoulders.

An additional benefit is that customers booking via travel agents are increasingly getting as good an experience as those booking directly, which hadn’t always been the case historically.

“ If anyone was on the cusp of speaking to [Attacat] for help with whatever issues they've got with HubSpot, I'd recommend they pick up the phone because it would become fairly obvious from the first conversation they have [that Attacat] know what [they]'re at and can provide an easy-to-understand solution.”

– Adrian Sprake, Head of Data Management, Travelopia Marine

Towards a completely contained HubSpot solution

Following on from this initial phase, Attacat have continued to assist Sunsail and The Moorings with their HubSpot adoption. As Adrian says, “Anything we can do to move towards a completely contained HubSpot solution is ultimately going to make it easier on the passengers”.

Attacat and Travelopia are also now working together on other Travelopia brands, covering configuration, integration and custom HubSpot user interface development (“UI extensions”), together with user adoption assistance.

Book a free discovery call

Know you've got a process that needs sorting? Or feel you aren't making the most of HubSpot? Let's discuss...