by Hannah Barrett, on April 1, 2025
Based in White Plains, NY, Trailways Ticketing & Marketing LLC operates trailways.com and trailways.ca for Trailways Inc., a bus company established in 1936 that offers city-to-city travel and charter bus rentals in North America.
The Problem: Data Inaccuracy & Manual Processes
Trailways was experiencing data inaccuracy and cumbersome processes with their prior data analytics provider, Datorama. The platform couldn’t keep up with the company’s growing data needs. Manual processes and incorrect reporting were slowing them down.
The Solution: Build Confidence in Reporting Processes
After partnering with Arkatechture to build a lean data pipeline, using Tableau, Snowflake, AWS S3, and Lamda. Trailways has achieved remarkable improvements in their data operations. It streamlined analytics for carrier partners by delivering daily reports on available capacity, a significant milestone in their analytics journey.
Arkatechture was best aligned with how we work and how we think about doing ongoing iterative development. So it seemed like a good fit. And I think also one of the key factors was that Arkatechture was great about doing a proof of concept on a snapshot of data to show that we could get to the necessary place with them as a partner.”
- Tabor Wells, Chief Technology Officer at Trailways
Trailways now has a well-built dashboard for Net Promoter Scores (NPS) as part of the customer analytics work they have done for their data platform migration. The foundation provided by the new system allows Trailways to integrate additional data sources seamlessly and deliver new reports faster than ever before.
...So now they can see where there are potential sellouts occurring and optimize their inventory availability, to maximize sales. That’s been a key win for us.” -Tabor Wells
Project Results
- Trailways has seen a reduction in time to generate reports to support back-office accounting and reconciliation.
- They've improved data quality management via dashboards that incorporate sanity checks against business logic to identify when upstream data providers have issues.
Takeaways: 3 Tips From Trailways
Trailways highlighted several takeaways from their project experience that they would recommend to anyone approaching a data transformation:
- Develop a clear vision and goals: A clear understanding of the desired outcomes and an upfront assessment of current-state gaps were critical to success.
- Consider an iterative process: An iterative development process provided the flexibility needed to manage changing requirements over time.
- Choose the right partner: Partnering with Arkatechture ensured access to expertise in Snowflake and Tableau, crucial for the project’s success.
