Sykes have delivered 27% more impressions so far this year versus 2020 and we continue to serve to more than just cottages.
Sykes is a platform that delivers for our customers and owners alike, at scale. So far this year we have delivered over half a billion impressions (individual search results) this is 27% up on 2020 (still pre-pandemic at this point…
Digging into this data a little deeper we can see that we are serving more than just cottages, impressions here are divided over number of properties, on average as a proportion Caravans have received the highest proportion of impressions per unit.
However, breaking down our properties by type reminds us that cottages remains our bread and butter, but we have a healthy selection available for whatever our customers fancy.
If you would like to join our fantastic team of colleagues, please get in touch!.
Today I'm looking at how the powerhouse of our business - our people - has changed since I joined Sykes in 2016. We've gone from two hundred people in two offices to nearly one thousand people based across over twenty offices spanning two continents in just five years. That's phenomenal growth.
Every year we've increased headcount, even in 2020. In the first two months of 2022, we've already achieved the headcount increase we made in 2021. Assuming we continue on this trajectory, 2022 looks set to be a record-breaking year for new colleagues joining the Sykes family.
It's interesting is to see which teams are driving this growth. Our Technology and Product teams have expanded by 200% each since 2016. This capacity ensures we can optimise our internal systems whilst continuing to push the envelope. We've created an effective UX team to optimise our online experience and launched ambitious infrastructure projects, such as setting the whole business up for hybrid working.
We've developed whole new functions, such as our Digital Media and Integration teams. These teams reflect our ambition - we're dedicating people to ensuring we do a great job of bringing new brands into the Sykes family - and our commitment to quality. Building a dedicated Digital Media team means we've been able to showcase our fantastic cottages with high-quality images. We're now strengthening that team with more people to develop exciting new channels to communicate with our customers, owners and people.
But despite our push in the technology and digital space, the personal touch matters more than ever. I was interested to see that - despite over 80% of our business taking place online - we've still grown our Reservations teams by over 200% in five years. Even in this increasingly online world, we still need more great people than ever providing expert advice that helps customers plan their perfect holiday.
If you would like to join our fantastic team of colleagues, please get in touch!.
Sykes are using Kafka and Snowflake to stream almost 5 million events per day during January from the website
We collect event data in order to optimise our website and ensure a world class booking experience for our customers. To take us to the next level, last year we invested in a new platform using Kafka and Snowflake. During our busiest period in our history we have streamed nearly 5 million events in a single day.
This is key new capability for Sykes, and we are using it to turbo charge A/B testing capability, ensuring we continue to deliver a seamless booking experience for our customers.
During the same window our Product teams have been incredibly busy, experimenting and testing new features on the website, as you can see there are well over 100 experiments running on the website, peaking at 134 earlier in the month.
With this capability in place, we can gain a much greater understanding of our customers’ needs and their behaviour through the booking journey, in real time. The Product team are fully self-sufficient with a scalable platform in place.
About Sykes
The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.
Sykes demonstrating excellent levels of NPS throughout our busiest period of the year
Customer satisfaction is passion for us at Sykes and NPS (net promotor score) is something we obsess over in fact it is in everyone’s objectives. This year we have managed to maintain an NPS of 74 since the start of January and the satisfaction levels are climbing.
Finding a true industry benchmark is challenging but we are incredibly proud of our results. According to an Survey Monkey article 74 puts us well inside the top 25% of companies across all industries. Our volume is high with over 40% of customers leaving feedback.
A key driver of NPS for us is the experience our customers have with us when calling in, as you can see on average, we managed to answer over 95% of all calls across all lines, with not a single line dropping below 91%, again measured during our busiest trading period. This goes to show the hard work of our operations team and effectiveness of our resource planning. We have answered over 40,000 customer calls since 1st Jan.
About Sykes
The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.
Owners are earning over 24% more per booking on average versus 2020 for January departures
A key feature of our technology platform here at Sykes is how our systems can quickly respond to changes in customer demand. Last week we showed how we’re seeing a surge in demand for short lead breaks. This time we’ve pulled together a quick viz to show the impact that surge in demand has had on average income for our owners
This simple viz is showing the year on year % difference in average owner income per booking for holidays in January. As you can see there was healthy growth in 2020 versus 2019 but this has been dwarfed by the increases our owners have enjoyed in 2022.
Further evidence of the advantages of being on board with Sykes and our award-winning technology platform. Our tools and team work together ensuring we balance booking volume and revenue growth. We have come a very long way from 52-week brochure pricing.
About Sykes
The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.
Demand in the past week still showing large bias early (Winter) months (short lead) versus 2020
Following on from last week, we have put together a quick viz to look at demand (searches) since last week and how they compared to the same period from 2020 (pre covid, so demand patterns were still normal then.)
With the exception of the lake district, across virtually all regions we are still seeing much more demand for the early months of the year this week.
About Sykes
The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.
Consumers are showing different booking patterns this year versus 2019…and there is reason to be optimistic for Summer
Following on our theme of "what are people booking now" we are looking at booking variances across a few different dimensions for the period from boxing day to now vs 2019 (as I think you will all agree 2020 was just little bit unusual)
All 3 graphs are showing variance this year vs 2019.
Booking Variance by Season
Firstly, looking at season there is a clear shift, to more Winter and Xmas (period) bookings.
Explained in part by the next chart which breaks down this variance into weeks until departure (lead time).
Variance by number of weeks to departure
In this graph we can see two distinct zones (the period to the right after week 40) is quite low volume so the trends can be safely ignored.
This is showing quite clearly a shift to shorter lead time bookings, probably driven by consumer confidence in what’s going to happen in the longer term.
Variance by Region
The regional view is interesting there are some clear shifts present here too. We probably need to ask why a few more questions to understand what’s going on here. Some of it will be explainable by shifts in regional stock volumes.
Other possible causes could be people less willing to travel further or it could just be related again to the season they’re booking in, i.e. people travel further generally for their summer break that the winter.
These shifts to shorter lead time bookings could be seen as positive by the industry. If these shifts are driving incremental bookings i.e., bookings we might not otherwise received, then we can reasonably still expect the longer lead time bookings to come at some point.
Here at Sykes that is what we are seeing in terms of increased occupancy for Winter with the view that Summer will come later and be strong for demand.
As I have constantly said, we operate in a supply constraint market.
In next weeks blog post, we will dig a little more and attempt to answer the question on incrementality.
If you would like us to deep dive on any area or have questions, please post in the comments
About Sykes
The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.
In this post we are having a look at what people are booking right now. For bookings made since the start of the month we are looking at how they break down in terms of region and season.
In terms of season we can see most people are booking short lead time (the remaining few months of this year and the Winter months of 2022) these two bubbles combined account for nearly 54% of our bookings.
Regionally, The lakes, North Wales and Cornwall are our most popular destinations right now.
In our next post we will dive into this a little further and look into how this compares to previous years
About Sykes
The data and techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.
At Sykes we store data in S3 we currently have a large amount of data which needs to be managed according to various lifecycles.
I was recently looking at some of the reasons we store data in S3 and investigating how we could store the data in a more cost-effective way. For example, some data needs to be accessed frequently and other data could be stored in deep glacier as its important we keep the data, but it does not need to be online.
We have object's in the same bucket which would require different storage methods, we can lifecycle them based on their tag, which is fine for new objects which we can write with the correct tag, but we have lots of old objects which would need the correct tag.
The tagging
Tagging objects in bulk is a solved problem, questions such as this on stackoverflow show you how tagging in bulk would work.
Breaking this down a little, we are getting all of the objects and then passing over to another s3 command to do the tag. We want to filter the objects - so we add a grep in between.
The AWS CLI is a wrapper around a HTTPS API, so seeing the commands like that makes it clear that you can't reuse a HTTPS connection. This means each request is a DNS query, TCP negotiation, TLS negotiation and then finally the HTTP request and HTTP response.
Previous work on reducing the HTTPS overhead has proved that using Nginx as a reuse proxy with a keepalive connection to the backend HTTPS server has shown real performance increases.
A sample nginx config is below which would allow this
and a docker command to use this (assuming it's saved to a file called nginx.conf in your current working directory)
docker run -v `pwd`/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf:ro -p 12345:80 nginx
This brings up a docker container on the host port 12345, which will keep a connection alive, removing the DNS lookup, TCP connection and TLS connection per request.
Anything .localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1 so it's a great no config way of getting this to work. We can then override the endpoint which the AWS CLI uses to use this localhost connection instead by passing --endpoint http://s3.localhost:12345 to the AWS CLI.
Running the same 1,000 objects though now returns in 7 minutes 1.6 seconds a 45% reduction in time taken!
This increases the objects per second to 2.37.
Going even faster
xargs by default runs one process at a time, so by default running 1 simultaneous request. nginx is also designed to handle multiple requests, so we could start to thread the requests.
xargs has a very nice flag which allows this, -P {number} will allow you to run that number of processes in parallel, taking advantage of almost every machine having more than 1 thread available.
You can choose any number for this, I have 16 CPUs available on my machine (on linux running nproc will confirm) - I chose 10 as a test number, this leaves the final command as
and that now runs in 45 seconds for the same test 1,000 objects, bringing the total to 22.2 requests per second!
Conclusion
Connections, especially TLS connections take time to make; and for any large amount of requests (either via automated means or natural if a HTTPS connection is made as part of an API call) can be reused and improved in a similar way. It's transparent to the end service (in this case s3), but it does require an extra service in place which could go wrong.
We went from 1.3 objects per second to 22.2 objects per second (a 1707% increase) and wall time from 12 minutes and 30 seconds to 45 seconds which is a reduction of 94% from a minor tweak to the connections.
About Sykes
The techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.
This article explains how we prepared the website for an unknown amount of traffic.
About Sykes
The techniques shared in this article were produced by the development team at Sykes. If you are a talented Data Scientist, Analyst or Developer please check out our current vacancies.
