For a company that helps millions of people make their dream holidays a reality, seamless travel CX is everything. A missed moment, a slow response, a minor frustration can ripple across an entire trip. The trouble is, disconnected systems and data are increasingly creating major CX hurdles, even for market leaders.
No one understands that better than TUI, one of the world’s largest travel groups.
“It feels a bit like a before and after,” said Kira Drabner, Group CX Manager at TUI. “Like the whole travel industry, we were hit quite hard by COVID and then went through quite a bit of a transformation.”
Fortunately, TUI took a moment of disruption in the travel industry and used it to redefine how they listen to, learn from, and act on customer insights. What began as a patchwork of more than fifteen systems evolved into a single, unified CX platform - a live nerve center that connects the entire organization around one shared view of the traveler.
This evolution mirrors the broader travel industry’s CX transformation, where data, automation, and the voice of the customer are redefining what excellent customer service entails.
Connected Data and The Evolving Customer Experience in Travel
When Kira Drabner joined TUI’s CX team almost ten years ago, she found herself staring at a puzzle that nearly every large travel brand can relate to: a fragmented view of the customer.
“When I started, our voice-of-customer setup was super scattered. Every market was capturing feedback differently: more than 15 different systems, all siloed,” she explains.
Customers were more than happy to give feedback, but TUI’s team struggled to create a complete picture.
Each system had its own metrics, timelines, and processes. In practice, this meant that customer data was stored in disconnected pockets throughout the business. “It took 2-3 weeks to actually get the data sets from everyone to begin with, so we were always one step behind. Nothing was proactive.”
For a sector where moments matter, that delay is a killer. In travel, you don’t get many second chances. “If a holiday doesn’t go right, you usually don’t get a second chance,” says Drabner. “The moment’s gone.”
This forced TUI to step back and rebuild its entire travel customer feedback system from the ground up. The team wanted one trusted source of information that everyone could use: a single point of truth guiding quicker decisions, smoother service, and smarter ways to respond to travelers in real time.
Great Customer Experience in Travel Starts with Clarity
“When things restarted after COVID, the decision was made that none of the old systems would come back,” says Drabner. “From that day onwards, it was Qualtrics or nothing.”
That decision to rebuild from scratch became the cornerstone of TUI’s digital transformation. Rather than piecing together outdated systems, TUI consolidated its entire CX stack around one unified CX platform that spans markets, brands, and teams.
TUI isn’t alone on this journey to improve listening and connect data.
Across the travel and hospitality space, brands are racing to streamline and simplify CX technology. Leading organizations are moving toward “platform convergence”, unifying customer touchpoints and analytics under one roof.
They’re connecting CDPs, CRMs, contact center tools, and journey orchestration platforms, so they can start reacting to travelers’ needs in real time, across every channel. Drabner and her team turned this philosophy into practice. By breaking down data silos and aligning global teams on one consistent framework, TUI fundamentally changed how it listens to travelers.
The Rise of the “Experience Enterprise” in TUI
For TUI, Qualtrics went beyond simply connecting data. It empowered employees. That’s important because the real secret to great customer experience in travel isn’t just collecting feedback; it’s getting everyone across the business to act on it.
“We had a massive growth in users of the platform, which for me is the most important number,” says Kira Drabner. “It’s not about fancy board reports but about making customer feedback available to employees.”
TUI used a connected data and CX strategy to launch the evolution into an actual “experience enterprise”. Instead of CX sitting in a corner office, the company made it part of everyone’s day job, from contact center agents to airport reps and destination teams. “It’s not just about head-office people, it’s for those in customer service centers, destinations, airports, hotels … the people actually working with customers,” Drabner explains.
With the unified CX platform in place, employees could now see in real time how travelers were feeling and act before small issues became big problems. Over 10,000 people across TUI’s global teams log in regularly to make better everyday decisions.
That cultural transformation separates reactive brands from proactive ones. When frontline staff are empowered with live data, satisfaction rises on both sides of the equation.
Research backs up this concept, showing that companies aligning employee and customer engagement outperform their peers by 147 percent in earnings per share. That’s the measurable business value of connecting EX and CX, something TUI is demonstrating at a global scale.
Instead of relying on quarterly reviews or survey summaries, feedback now flows continuously through the organization. The travel customer feedback system becomes a living, breathing part of the company, and an everyday compass for decision-making.
Real-Time Feedback and Frontline Empowerment
If TUI’s unified system brought structure, what truly brought it to life were the people using it every day. For Kira Drabner, one particular example stands out.
“My favorite example is our customer-service center in Cairo,” she said. “The agents each have two screens, one for their operations system and one with a Qualtrics dashboard that refreshes every 15 minutes … so they can always see how happy customers are with the service they’re providing.”
It’s a simple setup, but it captures everything the new travel customer feedback system is about: real-time visibility, transparency, and ownership. That kind of empowerment transforms travel customer service from reactive to responsive.
The company has focused on simplicity and alignment too, connecting insights to roles: “If we want to engage frontline staff, it needs to be easy and clear,” Drabner adds. “Let’s not overload it, maybe we have a hundred filters, but we only show the five most relevant ones.”
The future of customer experience in travel will be built on the same principle. Every touchpoint, every agent, and every destination team will have live visibility into the customer journey, powered by orchestration technology and a unified CX strategy.
Balancing Local Relevance and Global Efficiency
For a global organization, keeping customer experience consistent while staying sensitive to local differences is tough. Every market has its own culture, language, and expectations.
That challenge was especially true for TUI, which historically operated with substantial local autonomy. “In the past, the different markets operated very much on their own,” recalls Kira Drabner. “That’s one of the things that’s massively changed. Now our teams are structured in a group way.”