Improving commercial decision making

Datasparq was engaged to help Gatwick’s car parking and commercial products team, who were looking to improve car park occupancy and pricing using advanced analytics and modern data platform capabilities.

Gatwick had previously worked extensively to review pricing strategies and develop initial forecasts and booking curves. The team has continued to improve parking commercial strategies using data from Google Analytics to better calculate optimal pricing.

Automating processes

However, the data platform, in place at the time and the pricing tools demanded a lot of manual processes to deliver effective trading-decision reporting, and required a step-change in capability to drive further improvements.

Gatwick’s longer term aspiration required the new data and analytics platform to be able to support multiple data sources to deliver BI and analytics use-cases, but also be extensible to support machine learning to help with more advanced use-cases such as dynamic pricing calculations.

Smarter tooling

During the initial approach the solution was designed and deployed on AWS, making use of tools like Databricks, Microsoft SQL server and S3 storage layer that aligned with the corporate IT architecture at the time. The solution proved to be more expensive than initially anticipated and inflexible in supporting more use cases that rely heavily on SQL data exploration and machine learning.

Datasparq suggested migrating the solution to Google Cloud Platform due to its superior data analytics and AI capabilities but also to make use of the BigQuery ecosystem. The solution proved to be faster, more robust and flexible to support BI and AI applications.