Turning around a luxury travel publisher

Where it stood

Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report is a members-only guide to the best hotels and hideaways in the world. When I joined in October 2017, the company had sold its travel office and its advertising business, and the part that remained had to grow on memberships, with a technology team that spent too much of its week on work nobody had planned.

What we changed

We started with the customer journey. I brought in Fishtown Analytics, the team that created dbt and later became dbt Labs, and together we built a modern data stack so every team could see how a visitor became a member. Then we put machine learning to work scoring which visitors were most likely to join.

We tested the paywall and the free guest pass constantly, I led the company through GDPR, and in 2019 we replaced the membership platform and site search the company had been building in-house.

Most of it came down to culture: teams that shared the data, talked to each other and respected the people they were serving. I rebuilt the engineering team around that and hired for it, worked out a shared set of KPIs with the marketing team, and trained people outside engineering to read the visitor data themselves.

Where it landed

Modern data practices, a changed company culture, cross-team collaboration and a real respect for the customer journey paved the way for a 100X increase in the visitor to paid-subscriber conversion rate. TLG acquired Hideaway Report in 2020.