Bespoke data management at ‘the Airbnb of camper vans’

MyCamper earned the nickname ‘the Airbnb of camper vans’ by helping private owners rent out their vehicles to holidaymakers.

Swiss entrepreneur Michele Matt founded the company when he looked out onto his driveway and realised there was a potential business opportunity sitting there, unused for most of the year.

The business now draws on a ‘rental fleet’ of over 2000 campers and provides them to holidaymakers for a rental price.

Early data, early days

Data collection and analysis was a priority to Matt from the start. However, the new start-up found Google Analytics too limited for its purposes, and the small team lacked the skills to manually build the necessary data-crunching tools.

MyCamper filled this analytics skills gap by partnering with another Swiss company, BI Concepts, which offered ‘data integration, data modelling and data visualisation’ support to its clients.

BI Concepts provided data visualisations to help MyCamper understand and meet its KPIs, and to support decision-making around processes for business functions like taking bookings and identifying financial indicators of performance.

This level of service was helpful; however MyCamper was still unable to establish a comparable baseline or analyse historical data easily.

The solution lay in building a more bespoke platform.

Combination, not duplication

BI Concepts added Tableau to its toolset, along with Salesforce and a cloud data warehouse called Snowflake. This provided a repository where data could be transformed using the Fivetran Transformations DBT (data build tool) and prepared for reporting.

Once the dashboards were built, MyCamper staff could use the self-service analytics without the need of a data scientist or analyst on their permanent staff.

The combination of platforms allowed MyCamper to see instantly which vehicles were available or booked at any time, and to fine-tune their business to better suit their clients’ needs: its analytics platform even provides renters with insights into the best times for hiring out campers, something that they had no visibility of before. This capability meant owners can better plan when to use the vehicles themselves, taking into account when it’s most profitable to rent them out through MyCamper. 

Full story at Fivetran.com