How The Travel Corporation uses monday.com to deliver great work faster across global teams

For over 100 years, The Travel Corporation (TTC) has operated a world-renowned travel and hotel portfolio. With over 40 brands, including Trafalgar, Contiki Tours, Uniworld River Cruises, and Red Carnation Hotels, TTC has established itself as a global leader in the travel industry.

What sets TTC apart? Its founding principle: Driven by Service.

"We actively prioritize innovation and push boundaries to create incredible experiences for our customers," says Sam Hollinshead, Business Improvement Lead.

In an industry that demands near-perfect execution, TTC is committed to providing exceptional customer service across its award-winning brands.

Meeting TTC’s ambitious goals requires working as efficiently as possible. But without a single solution to connect its people and processes, TTC’s global workforce faced collaboration challenges. That was standing in the way of faster and higher-quality work across its entire portfolio.

"We’ve never had one central space to manage all of our work,” Sam recalls. “There were so many emails."

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic introduced new complexities and some tough decisions. The tourism industry changed dramatically — and, like many companies, TTC pivoted to a remote working environment and found itself operating with a leaner workforce.

“The world really changed in front of our eyes,” says Bob Styles, the Product Manager who brought monday.com into TTC. “And we had a portfolio of new projects, many of which we just didn’t see coming.”

"Given that we were reprioritizing and reorganizing our business verticals globally, further change on top of that was tough," says Andrea Josse, Program Manager. "We needed to find a way to work more efficiently and more collaboratively than ever before."

TTC began experimenting with various project management tools, all to limited success.

"Our old system was too clunky, too admin-heavy, and generally the wrong fit for what we were trying to do,” describes Bob. “Because it didn't work well, we didn't really use it.”

Bob knew TTC’s ideal project management solution would need to be:

• Flexible enough to fit the diverse needs of TTC’s workforce
• Intuitive to drive the company-wide adoption necessary to make it work

“We looked at other big players in the project management space,” explains Andrea. “monday.com came out on top because it provided an effective solution to many of the use cases we needed, within the same license cost.”

Just as key: the ease of adoption, which was important given stakeholders’ busy schedules. “We wanted to be able to teach them how to use the platform, create different ways to visualize data, and export reports in a way that anyone could easily understand,” says Bob. “It was very easy to take the complex, put it into monday.com, and make it simple."

Especially with so much change happening, both within the travel industry and inside TTC, the implementation process needed to be managed with care.

"We reached out to monday.com’s Customer Success team to help us overcome barriers and reluctance to change," recalls Andrea. "It was a big undertaking, so we had to put a structured business change governance framework into an unstructured environment."

“We outlined our success criteria from the start to align on expectations,” Andrea adds. “Together, we decided to identify the areas in which we could add the most immediate day-to-day value and deliver those use cases first.”

Splitting up the roll-out into smaller, more manageable stages helped TTC win over its workforce by directly showing them the value that monday.com brings.

“There are so many different ways that monday.com has increased our efficiency and output from a collaboration perspective,” explains Krishangy Suri, Business Analyst. “But it's the automations and integrations that really allow us to work faster.”

TTC works with over 500 external partners to deliver travel experiences. Prior to using monday.com, these partners would need to be individually notified of any important announcements, outages, or updates through e-mail.

“Now, with the Outlook integration, I can automatically send those 500 emails with just one click,” says Krishangy. “Not only is this a massive, massive time saver, but it also helps us strengthen our partner relationships because we’re able to communicate faster.”

One of TTC’s most urgent pain points was managing its global marketing initiatives.

"Marketing campaigns require resourcing and input from several teams and understanding priorities as well as where we could remove duplication and inefficiencies was key" explains Andrea.

Now, using a no-code form within monday.com, TTC can easily accept marketing briefs from any of its team members globally. Once a brief is submitted, it automatically appears on TTC’s marketing requests board for review and allocation.

“This allows us to accurately evaluate the requests and allocate resourcing accordingly as well as realistic timeframes,” says Sam.

Once the marketing request is approved, powerful automations move the details directly into several of TTC’s marketing boards for each department to execute on the work. This allows TTC to manage all marketing activities and relevant information in one place, which is critical when working across multiple brands, teams, and time zones.

TTC’s Black Friday campaign, for instance, required creating and deploying over 360 marketing assets per global campaign. By using monday.com to manage campaign details and deadlines, fewer than 10 team members were able to deliver the assets. The campaign was a resounding success.

"There’s no way, in my opinion, that such a small team would have been able to deliver that many high-quality assets on time without monday.com,” says Andrea.

To maximize time, resources, and budget, TTC stakeholders needed visibility into workload and potential project risks.

"Before monday.com, people were virtually knocking on your door all the time for information,” explains Andrea. "Our teams operate in completely different time zones, so sometimes you'd have to wait until the next day to get an update on where a project was at.”

With monday.com dashboards, teams at TTC now have access to the data they need in real-time. This helps them make data-driven decisions, reallocate resources, and prevent costly delays. Risks are directly linked to the projects they impact and project stakeholders can keep track of change requests in one central location.

"With monday.com, we have the flexibility to look at many projects at a time at a high level or drill down individually," explains Krishangy. “This allows project managers to raise risks and get changes approved quickly.”

"What's been really handy is the ability to link multiple boards with dashboards – which is critical to portfolio management,” adds Andrea.

Following the successful rollout of monday.com, TTC is operating more efficiently than ever before, enabling the company to navigate new challenges with ease. So, what's next? Using the power of the platform to continue to provide the innovation and exceptional service that TTC is known for.

“We've just done a post-implementation review with monday.com’s Customer Success team,” she shares. “Everyone came together to review the processes we’ve rolled out so far and discuss ideas for continuous improvement going forward. This year, one of our key focuses is to create a holistic, cross-department portfolio view to continue to drive efficiency and visibility.”