Firemind Helps Center Parcs Unlock 360-Degree Customer Insights, Enabling 90% Customer Satisfaction Rate

Center Parcs sets the standard for family short breaks in the UK and Ireland, with six villages all set amongst 400 acres of stunning woodland. Center Parcs welcomes over 2.2 million guests each year, offering high-quality accommodations, myriad indoor and outdoor activities, an award-winning spa, as well as a range of different shops, restaurants, and bars. While Center Parcs stored vast amounts of first- and third-party data—everything from booking details and guest feedback to wait times and financial reporting—the company struggled to make the most of it. “We were previously having to piece together data in a very manual and time-consuming way, meaning gathering the full insights in a timely manner was difficult. Our vision was to be responsive, agile and quick to deliver new insights and trends,” says Adi Clowes, head of business intelligence at Center Parcs. “It was all there, but it needed processing and power.”

The company’s existing data warehouse—built on a relational SQL database—couldn’t accommodate and process high volumes of unstructured and semi-structured data. A lack of real-time interfaces hindered the company’s ability to respond promptly to customer needs and operational issues, which in turn impacted the high-quality service that Center Parcs constantly strives to achieve. It became essential to centrally integrate the company’s diverse data sources, which weren’t previously absorbed into a scalable, real-time, advanced analytics solution, to complement the existing data platform.

To address these data challenges—and to lay the foundation for artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics—Center Parcs turned to Firemind, an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner specializing in data and AI. Firemind worked to quickly understand Center Parcs’ business requirements and how it could support the company through advanced data management. “We took a three-pronged approach to Center Parcs’ solution,” said Ben Wheeler, CTO at Firemind. “The goal was to enable the ingestion of real-time data streams, improve the handling of semi-structured and unstructured data, and lay the groundwork for analytics and machine learning.”

First, Firemind restructured Center Parcs’ existing data warehouse so that it could effectively interface with a new data lake on AWS. This involved migrating key datasets into the data lake, including post-journey survey data, digital web interactions, guest services information, and incident reports. By doing so, Firemind created a scalable infrastructure that could efficiently manage large volumes of data while supporting future expansion. Firemind leveraged a robust set of AWS services to build Center Parcs' data lake solution. Amazon Redshift serves as the core data store, integrating various data sources through AWS Lambda pipelines. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) makes up the core of the data lake, while Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager provide real-time monitoring and automated management. Amazon SageMaker also enables advanced data modeling to further enhance the platform's analytical capabilities.

The collaboration between Center Parcs and Firemind was fluid and iterative, with an ongoing development release cycle to continually improve and expand the data lake’s capabilities. This ensured that the solution both met the immediate needs of Center Parcs and positioned it to evolve its analytics in the future. Implemented over just a few months, the platform now serves as the foundation for Center Parcs’ data-driven decision-making processes, enabling the company to offer more personalized short break experiences to its guests.

The new data lake architecture has allowed Center Parcs to react quickly to operational challenges and enhance the guest experience. This has improved service delivery by halving the time spent bringing new data sets into Center Parcs’ data platform. It has also boosted the company’s internal Delivering Excellent Service (DES) metric, which measures overall customer satisfaction. The DES score now sits at 90 percent satisfaction, with 89 percent of customers indicating intention to return and 64 percent saying they would recommend Center Parcs to a friend. Each of these scores reflects one- to two-point year-over-year growth since the implementation of Firemind’s solution—and the improved guest experience it enables.

Center Parcs is now able to precisely visualize data about its guests using the data lake architecture. By mapping out the 900+ lodges in each of its villages, Center Parcs can now analyze trends in guest feedback, identifying areas with frequent complaints or maintenance issues. With these insights, Center Parcs can pinpoint and proactively address localized problems to a degree that wasn’t possible without the real-time data processing enabled by Firemind and AWS.

The advanced analytics capabilities have also laid the groundwork for future innovations, including machine learning models that predict customer needs and personalize offerings. Center Parcs now has a clear vision of creating a comprehensive 360-degree view of each guest. "That’s our end-game vision,” says Adi. “Whether it's the guest or the operation or the business, we want data management that enables that kind of complete 360 view.”