All I Want for Christmas is an On-Time Flight

By Kim Honjo, Content Marketing Associate, Salesforce

FlightStats is a leader in providing real-time global flight information, servicing airlines, airports, travel agencies, developers, consumers, and more. By providing data services and applications to customers across the entire global travel ecosystem, its data powers many of the most popular travels apps in the world, and helps millions of people better manage their travel day. We spoke with Micky Matthews, Director of Business Process Management and Candice Parfitt, Marketing Communications Manager, to find out how Salesforce gives them a 360-view of their business and how they’ll help you survive your holiday travel plans.

Tell us your origin story. How did FlightStats get started?

FlightStats started selling flight status information via APIs in 2005. The market for real-time flight data barely existed and providers of that data was limited. Web Services was still in its infancy, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) was just beginning its ascent. But our roots in travel actually extend further back. Our predecessor company, Sight & Sound, was responsible for the BookSmart booking engine that powered many of the original airline booking sites on the Internet. We’ve grown up a lot since then and now have a team of over 70 employees.

Who uses FlightStats? Can I use FlightStats?

Yes! Individual travelers can use our data to search for their flights. You can use our mobile application — just input your flight info and track your flight. Our main focus though is on our B2B side of the business, where our customers are airlines, airports, travel management companies, online travel booking websites, search engines, and developers looking to use flight data for their applications.

What distinguishes you from your competitors?

Our platform and data really separates us from our competition. The quality of our data combined with contextual information provides deeper insight for our customers which really differentiates us. This enables customers to have a better, more accurate picture of what is actually happening.

How did you get started using Salesforce?

We implemented Salesforce in June 2015. We had been using another CRM for years, but over time, as our business needs changed, we realized that we needed a platform that integrated more with other systems. Looking holistically at what we needed in the long run, Salesforce seemed like a better choice for the organization as it’s growing. Today, we have a third of our employees using Sales Cloud. We have our professional services team using the Milestones PM app that they’ve customized. We’re also working on integrating our accounting solution and tying that into our API platform and our subscription billing system will also sit on top of Salesforce.

That’s great! How has your team benefitted from the switch?

Our salespeople really like Salesforce much better than our previous system, and find it more intuitive. They say, “it’s just so much easier to use. It makes so much sense. I’m getting value out of this already since it’s easier to use.” They really like using collaboration tools like Chatter to share information, which is something that they had never done before. Our forecasting has greatly improved. Once Salesforce was implemented, our business analysts and sales teams moved forecasting into the CRM because there’s greater visibility there. Reporting tools are robust and easy to use as well. But maybe the most valuable thing that we learned while implementing Salesforce was realizing that we needed to update a lot of our customer information and data. We could see right away the missing information on our customers that our other CRM didn’t show us. Now we’re making sure we have usable, updated information.

With all the traveling that goes on at this time of year, what’s it like at FlightStats during the holiday season?

We definitely see an uptick in business from airlines, airports, developers and travel management companies needing our data around the holidays. We also need to accommodate every traveler who wants info on crazy weather and flight delays etc. Because many people are relying on that data, we always need to ensure that the information we provide is accurate. We have a whole process of looking at every piece of data before we send it out to the travel ecosystem.

What’s in the future for FlightStats?

We’d love to tie together this final set of integration products so we have a 360-view of our business and all of data can live in one place. That’s one of our goals technology-wise. We’re really starting to find our way in marketing and discovering what works and what doesn’t. It would be great to create landing pages and have automated emails helping us. We’re hoping to use Pardot in the future. As a company, productivity is a big goal for us. We want to be able to help our sales team work more efficiently with their leads, and decrease our sales cycle.

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