Category: We Love Data

60 seconds with Tech: Tolly Von Der Heyde, Business Analyst

As we continue to grow our Tech team, we'd like to introduce you to some of the fantastic talent we already have on board. In our '60 seconds with Tech' series we'll introduce you to various people within the department and take a closer look at their role and some of the projects they're working on.

What first attracted you to SE?

I have family within the hospitality industry and my new role is focused on analytics and project management which is my skill base. Also, the interview process was really friendly!

What does a typical day at SE look like for you?

Reasonably varied between supporting the team as the first line of support and moving forward the core project of the quarter.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

The team I work with are very welcoming and supportive of each other.

Your favourite holiday destination and why?

The Alps (specifically the three valleys) because I love to ski!

What 3 items would you take with you to a deserted island?

A book, a flare and a towel, you should never go anywhere without your towel.

Any interesting talents or hobbies to share?

I love sport! Rugby, surfing, skiing and skeleton luge are some of my favourites.

Why would you recommend SE as the place to be to others?

I would absolutely recommend SE as a place to work! The combination of an incredible group of people all with a positive attitude towards work has made it an awesome first month!

If you’re interested in applying for a role in Tech, discover your next opportunity here.

60 seconds with Tech: Mahrukh Tariq, Salesforce Business Analyst

As we continue to grow our Tech team, we'd like to introduce you to some of the fantastic talent we already have on board. In our '60 seconds with Tech' series we'll introduce you to various people within the department and take a closer look at their role and some of the projects they're working on.

What first attracted you to SE?

The work culture. Love the vibrant holiday vibe going on while getting work done! 

What does a typical day at SE look like for you?

Identifying where we can help our revenue and operation teams to boost our sales through salesforce. Looking at how we can provide solutions to keep the salesforce processes aligned with our business and analysing salesforce data to figure out where we can improve. 

What do you enjoy most about your role?

Exploring what the business is about and how we can make it better. 

Your favourite holiday destination and why?

Japan. For their culture, history and cherry blossom trees. 

What 3 items would you take with you to a deserted island?

A word search book, a good pair of shoes, a good camera. 

Any interesting talents or hobbies to share?

Taking pictures of sunsets, exploring new music and going to the cinema. 

Why would you recommend SE as the place to be to others?

For the vibrant work culture, free food and discounts on travelling.

If you’re interested in applying for a role in Tech, discover your next opportunity here.

60 seconds with Tech: Product Analyst, Darshana Sridhar

As we continue to grow our Tech team, we'd like to introduce you to some of the fantastic talent we already have on board. In our '60 seconds with Tech' series we'll introduce you to various people within the department and take a closer look at their role and some of the projects they're working on.

What first attracted you to SE?

How supportive the atmosphere seemed, and how lovely everyone was to talk to even in the early recruitment stages!

What does a typical day at SE look like for you?

No two days are the same, which is great! Typically, I’d have some meetings to understand stakeholder requirements for a piece of analysis, followed by speaking to the data team to source the data needed for this – and then the fun bit, which is actually carrying out the analysis and putting it into a digestible format for end users.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

I love how much creativity I can use in helping to solve important business problems. I also love that there is continuous growth and learning potential, both when it comes to useful technical skills as well as more about the business and the travel industry as a whole – I learn something new every day.

Your favourite holiday destination and why?

I would have to say Italy – the food is incredible, the history is so rich and the weather is almost always amazing!

What 3 items would you take with you to a deserted island?

My crockpot, my kindle and hair straighteners…a lack of electricity and internet might be an issue though!

Any interesting talents or hobbies to share?

I love cooking and trying out new recipes, but I’m an absolutely rubbish baker!

Why would you recommend SE as the place to be to others?

There is so much support and encouragement from across the team when it comes to onboarding and longer-term career and skills development. We hear it a lot, but the team is incredible – everyone is genuinely so kind and patient.

If you’re interested in applying for a role in Tech, discover your next opportunity here.

My first Hack day: Kirsten Grieve, Data Warehouse Engineer

Our monthly Hack days are such a great initiative at Secret Escapes. So, having recently changed to a more technical role, I jumped at the chance to take the reins and participate in our May Hack day (my first) alongside other members of the SE Tech team.

I saw this as a great opportunity to try out a new challenge. Plus, as you have to present your findings back to the team at the end of the two day event, it’s also a good way to get more experience presenting to a wide ranging technical audience.

My feelings before Hack day…

Having never done a Hack day before, I was a bit apprehensive about what to expect. 

Initially, I was a little nervous about what the scope of my proposed project to tackle should be, with only two days of hacking to crack it (technically a day and a half, as the second half of day two, is presenting your findings back to the business!) 

I was also a bit concerned about potential blockers I might encounter, but overall I was quite excited to have the freedom and flexibility to shape the project as I liked and take some time away from the day to day to explore and play around with new tools. 

Prepping for Hack day…

The project I chose to work on was around experimenting with different data diagramming tools to see if they would be fit for the current data landscape at Secret Escapes. 

We are currently upskilling, as well as hiring more analysts within the business, and I thought having some clear annotated diagrams of our datasets for new starters would be a great resource to give a basic overview of the data landscape. 

My prep:


1) I selected the dataset to use

2) I decided upon some success metrics with these tools which I could then use to score each tool I tried against

3) I did some research on the tools out there, read some blogs and from this decided on which tools I was going to try out

So, how did it go? 

All in all, a really good experience!  At first, it felt a bit alien to be extracting myself from the regular day to day project/backlog work and look into something completely new. 

I particularly enjoyed being able to determine the scope of work. If I ended up being interested in a specific aspect of a tool I could spend more time investigating this further, while at the same time if at first glance I knew a tool wouldn’t be suitable for SE I could write up my findings quickly and move on. 

I spent the most time looking into the first tool just to get familiar with the dataset and how to navigate the process, but once I got going I ended up looking at more tools than I expected. Not all of them worked and some of them worked very differently from what I’d read but I enjoyed the discovery component. 

Presenting back to a Technical audience was interesting as it’s not something I do very often (I usually present to either non-technical stakeholders or within my own Data team). Overall, I received positive feedback on my approach and presentation. 

In terms of the next steps, I’ll be kicking off wider discussions within the team as to whether we look into using any of these tools to improve our documentation. 

What I learnt…

  1. Prep is key – If I hadn’t made those decisions upfront, I probably would have used up a lot of the first day working through these.
  2. Stuff won’t work – One of the tools I was looking at that I thought was quite promising tried to overwrite our current setup in the backend – not my intention at all!
  3. You need to make quick decisions – you’re working on a tight schedule so you don’t have time to sit around and deliberate. For example, in one tool I was trying to work out how to connect Snowflake directly to a system to import the table DDLs, but after 30 mins with little success, I decided to park it and moved on to the next tool. 

Would I do it again?

Yes! 

I would 100% do it again, and I’d encourage anyone else who is thinking about it to give it a go! 

It was quite empowering to be given the freedom and flexibility to pick and run a mini project outside of the day job to work out. 

The experience will definitely stand me in better stead to have more informed and confident conversations on the tools out there. 

And, it was pretty fun to try out some new tech too!

Want to join our Tech Team? Find your next opportunity now!

App development review for iOS and Android

At Secret Escapes, we want to create an enjoyable and seamless experience for our members; from browsing and booking to storing all the useful trip information in their account. That’s why we are continuously developing and improving our web platform and apps, to provide a tailored and effortless experience for each user.

In the last six months, the mobile apps team, quirkily named “No Doubt” have been focusing on providing a frictionless user experience, by delivering structural changes to the iOS and Android apps. Reducing friction was our starting point, as we wanted to streamline our customers’ experience, to help each one find the best trips that are tailored to their search requirements. 

After that, one of the biggest implementations we have been working on is the ability to deep-link our app users from an email to inside the app. During the pandemic, our business model changed and evolved rapidly, with our catalogue of deals growing by almost 15 times in one year. Consequently, our team has been working on projects like deep-linking, so we can assist customers in navigating their way through this enormous amount of choice while maintaining optimum performance speeds. This technical challenge alone is massive!

Now, when a member clicks on an email link, they are sent directly to a specific in-app location, instead of being sent to our mobile website. As well as improving UX, this also means we can optimise our marketing campaigns around a single deal, stage or part of our catalogue without worrying about user navigation. Email continues to be one of our most successful marketing channels and ensuring we make the experience consistent for app members is important. Since we’ve added that functionality, we have seen our retention increase by 10% in the apps!

In the last few months, we have also been interviewing & surveying our members within the apps, then going through the feedback in order to understand the browsing pain points in our mobile applications. We discovered that our app homepage, which is naturally the most visited page, was too long for some. This made it hard to distinguish between each section, so some of the important content was easily being missed. From that, a new hypothesis emerged: to improve retention and ultimately conversion, we would need better presentation tactics that provide context for why we are showing content.  

We are excited to say we are just a few weeks from getting our first changes in front of our members. These changes include improving the navigation of the app homepage with clearly defined deal sections and improved navigation tools to help users find their dream destinations faster, plus deliver improved deal recommendations. We are also thinking about how to optimise the experience for our tablet users, as the audience is also growing on these devices. We will make changes incrementally, using a backend driven UI approach that allows us to make modular changes to the different sections and their order on the page. We will then be able to efficiently measure, test, learn and adapt our content strategy to deliver the best experience to our app users. 

Iphone before

Iphone after

Ipad after

Ipad before

Most recently, we have changed our search technology on both the website and the apps, which now means that search results load 20% faster than before.

Every day we learn, test, build and iterate incremental changes to the mobile apps. We continue investing in researching our customers’ needs to enable them to find the right deals faster, smarter and in an enjoyable way.