Hurb uses Metabase to improve their decision-making process and increase earnings.

The Challenge: Before Metabase, Hurb used their own Business Intelligence tool, built internally by their development team. This tool was good for building dashboards, but it was limited in allowing self-service analytics for everyone, and they thought that self-service was key to fostering a data-driven culture.

The Solution: In 2019, Hurb started looking for a tool to promote self-service analytics in order to democratize data all over the company. They chose Metabase because it allowed both technical and non-technical team members to engage with data.

The Results: Metabase has been a game-changer. It concentrates Hurb’s data and allows almost every team in the company to explore the data they need to make informed decisions.

"Using Metabase, we’ve allowed everyone in the company to get access to all data available to create, explore, and analyze anything they want. This surely is improving our decision-making process, resulting in an incalculable increase in our earnings. "

Felipe Amoedo Hadba
Head of Business Analytics at Hurb

Their mission is to optimize travel through technology and optimize time through science. Hurb’s engineering team has about 120 specialists, 20 of whom work on the Data & Analytics team.

Why Metabase?

The Hurb team was looking for data visualization and exploration solutions in open-source communities. They chose Metabase due to its user-friendly interface and its a rich toolset for both technical and non-technical teams.

The data

Hurb uses BigQuery, populated by some open source tools like Airflow, Apache Beam, and Dataflow. They also use Fivetran for Customer Experience and Marketing data and Salesforce for customer relationship management.

How Hurb team uses Metabase

The Hurb is trying to involve as many teams and departments as possible to create a tool that serves as the company’s single source of truth. They wanted Metabase to become the central data repository for data discovery and visualization.

So far almost every department uses Metabase, but the heaviest users are marketing and customer experience teams. For example, the marketing team monitors the performance of web search engines on the metasearch platforms related to travel and hotels. The customer experience team uses Metabase to monitor the sales reports of travel packets, as well as sales by destination region, promoter type, billing, and revenue by date.

The results

Metabase has democratized data inside Hurb company, providing autonomy in analytics. Anyone can create their own dashboards and use a tool as a single source of truth within the company. Reading the official Metabase documentation and experimenting with different dashboards has helped them to level up a tool usage. What surprised Hurb is that some employees use the questions and query repositories to learn SQL, ask their own questions, and explore data.

“Metabase for us is like a testing and learning environment.”, - Marcel Mello, Analytics Engineer at Hurb.

Advice for others

Two main pieces of advice from the Hurb Data Team are “Read the documentation” and “Find benchmarks on the market”. As far as best practices go, it is essential to document the data and provide great catalog and metadata information to organize and make data discovery work well.