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208 Part II • Descriptive Analytics

Application Case 4.8

Expedia.com’s Customer Satisfaction Scorecard
Expedia, Inc., is the parent company to some of the impact of satisfaction on the company’s profitability
world’s leading travel companies, providing travel or overall business objectives.
products and services to leisure and corporate trav-
elers in the United States and around the world. solution
It owns and operates a diversified portfolio of
well-recognized brands, including expedia.com, Expedia’s problem was not lack of data. The cus-
hotels.com, hotwire.com, TripAdvisor, Egencia, tomer satisfaction group at Expedia knew that it
had lots of data. In all, there were 20 disparate
Classic Vacations, and a range of other domestic databases with 20 different owners. Originally,
and international businesses. The company’s travel the group charged one of its business analysts
offerings consist of airline flights, hotel stays, car with the task of pulling together and aggregating
rentals, destination services, cruises, and package the data from these various sources into a num-
travel provided by various airlines, lodging prop- ber of key measures for satisfaction. The business
erties, car rental companies, destination service analyst spent 2 to 3 weeks every month pulling
providers, cruise lines, and other travel product and aggregating the data, leaving virtually no time
and service companies on a stand-alone and pack- for analysis. Eventually, the group realized that
age basis. It also facilitates the booking of hotel it wasn’t enough to aggregate the data. The data
rooms, airline seats, car rentals, and destination needed to be viewed in the context of strategic
services from its travel suppliers. It acts as an agent goals, and individuals had to take ownership of
in the transaction, passing reservations booked by the results.
its travelers to the relevant airline, hotel, car rental To tackle the problem, the group decided it
company, or cruise line. Together, these popular needed a refined vision. It began with a detailed
brands and innovative businesses make Expedia analysis of the fundamental drivers of the depart-
the largest online travel agency in the world, the ment’s performance and the link between this
third largest travel company in the United States, performance and Expedia’s overall goals. Next, the
and the fourth largest travel company in the world. group converted these drivers and links into a score-
Its mission is to become the largest and most card. This process involved three steps:
profitable seller of travel in the world, by helping
everyone everywhere plan and purchase everything 1. Deciding how to measure satisfaction.
in travel. This required the group to determine which
measures in the 20 databases would be use-
problem ful for demonstrating a customer’s level of
satisfaction. This became the basis for the
Customer satisfaction is key to Expedia’s overall mis- scorecards and KPIs.
sion, strategy, and success. Because expedia.com is 2. Setting the right performance targets.
an online business, the customer’s shopping expe- This required the group to determine whether
rience is critical to Expedia’s revenues. The online KPI targets had short-term or long-term pay-
shopping experience can make or break an online offs. Just because a customer was satisfied with
business. It is also important that the customer’s his or her online experience did not mean that
shopping experience is mirrored by a good trip the customer was satisfied with the vendor
experience. Because the customer experience providing the travel service.
is critical, all customer issues need to be tracked, 3. Putting data into context. The group had
monitored, and resolved as quickly as possible. to tie the data to ongoing customer satisfaction
Unfortunately, a few years back, Expedia lacked projects.
visibility into the “voice of the customer.” It had no
uniform way of measuring satisfaction, of analyz- The various real-time data sources are fed
ing the drivers of satisfaction, or of determining the into a main database (called the Decision Support

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