The Challenge

Pollen is a tech enabled travel and entertainment startup on a mission to build, curate and deliver the best experiences all over the world. They work closely with entertainment partners – such as Justin Bieber, J Balvin, The Vamps – and with hotels to put together multi-day experiences themed around the music, travel and passions of their audience. Bringing travel and entertainment together in a uniquely curated way introduces significant operational complexity that can only be reduced effectively through technology.

Once a Pollen Experience is reserved and paid for, they need to make it happen for the customer. Checking into their hotel rooms is the first physical touch point a customer has with Pollen and it has to be frictionless. To this end, their fulfilment team has a persistent mission to get customers the rooms they paid for, as fast as possible, with as little friction as possible. This requires an information heavy workflow with high data recency, completeness, accuracy and flexibility! To add scale to the challenge, it’s a workflow that’s repeated hundreds of times a month, taking up to 72 hours each time, requiring significant time and increasing the likelihood of human errors. To add scale to the challenge, they needed a substantial increase in reliability and scalability of this business critical, customer facing and information heavy workflow.

This process combines data from multiple sources and tools to send reports to hotels and upload the resulting room confirmations. Each hotel has their own reporting format. The process can be difficult to manage. Multiple data sources, tools both locally hosted and online, varying hotel reporting requirements and data latency issues had to be overcome.

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The Solution

The Retool app we developed enables the Fulfilment team at Pollen to confirm the list of travelers and the rooms they purchased with the hotels at several points in advance of check in, highlighting changes and ensuring every traveler gets what they paid for. It provides real-time access to traveler details, and enables them to download lists and keeps a record of them and eliminates errors by automating comparisons as lists change.

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The Results

Since releasing the app, Pollen has reduced effort to get travelers the rooms they paid for from 3 people over 3 days for each experience to 1 person in 1 hour with a 600% reduction in customer contacts related rooming errors.

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"They worked collaboratively with operations & engineering teams and quickly through App iterations based on feedback. Cost was transparent, capabilities were high, communication was clear and concise, they were the ideal partner and I wouldn’t hesitate to engage them again!"

Rishi Kumar
VP of Data @ Pollen