JUCY: Driving the future of adventure road trips for global travelers in the cloud
About JUCY
JUCY is a New Zealand campervan and car rental brand on a mission to enable road trips that enable travelers to discover their happiness through a spirit of passion, pride, family, and fun. Founded in 2001 by brothers Dan and Tim Alpe, JUCY has grown to deploy more than 2,000 vehicles across 10 locations around Australasia, and has welcomed travelers from more than 150 countries. The founders have road trips in their DNA, following in the footsteps of their father Chris Alpe, a motorhome tourism pioneer, and their grandfather Bob Alpe, a travel agency owner. JUCY is an eight-time winner of the Golden Backpacker Award, and a recipient of the 2021 New Zealand Reader Digest Quality Service Award.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usJUCY created innovative apps to fully automate sales and bookings, recovered business to pre-pandemic levels with 25% of original head office staff, and built an AI-driven expansion strategy with Google Cloud solutions.
Google Cloud results
- Enabled full business rebound from pandemic with 25% of original head office staff
- Drove cloud-based lean innovation strategy that enabled a leaner DevOps team of just 2 people
- Enabled time and cost efficiencies with 60% of customer check-ins made online before branch pickup
- Built an AI-driven expansion strategy based on existing data
97% of sales made with zero human interaction
As a country of dramatic natural beauty with craggy peaks, wild seafronts, glaciers, and mysterious forests, New Zealand has inspired dozens of locations for the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. But long before the Hollywood phenomenon, brothers Dan and Tim Alpe hatched a vision to open New Zealand's attractions to global visitors on quests of thrill, beauty, and adventure.
They launched JUCY in 2001 with a philosophy that a campervan rental business could be more than a vehicle provider, but a portal to freedom and discovery in one of the world's most stunning countries. By offering "the adventure of a lifetime," JUCY grew rapidly from just 35 campervans to fleets of hundreds of cars and campervans. Before long, it was welcoming people from 150 countries around the world, expanding into Australia and the United States, and moving into the cruise and hotel business. Then the pandemic hit and JUCY found its very survival under threat, as 95% of its global customers disappeared virtually overnight.
Undaunted, JUCY made a bold decision to weather the storm. A key component of the reinvention strategy consisted of a cloud-based digital reinvention that would enable it to rebuild its business on a lighter automated online business model, enabling it to build back with a significantly reduced workforce.
"We needed to rebuild the business almost from scratch. Google Cloud offered the best set of solutions to reimagine how we could build back stronger as a cloud native business. With a combination of App Engine, Firebase and BigQuery, we not only survived, we set up a more vibrant future."
—Dave Simmons, Head of Revenue, JUCYAfter evaluating major cloud providers, JUCY chose Google Cloud for its "reliability, scalability, and comprehensive range of services," drawn by a powerful combination of App Engine, Firebase and BigQuery. It was also impressed by what it calls the "superior, more intuitive user interface" of the Google Cloud console.
Google Cloud migration did more than help JUCY stay afloat, says Dave Simmons, Chief Revenue Officer JUCY. Its true power became clear as the pandemic began to abate. JUCY soon found its business return to pre-pandemic levels with only 25% of its original head office staff, and a DevOps team was in full operation with just two employees, instead of 20 people required to do similar tasks before the migration. These results were accompanied by better customer satisfaction, higher profit margins, and fair winds for renewed focus on business expansion.
"We had the opportunity to largely rebuild the business from scratch," says Simmons. "Google Cloud offered the best set of solutions to reimagine how we could build back stronger as a cloud native business. With a combination of App Engine, Firebase and BigQuery, we not only survived, we set up a more vibrant future."
Driving transformative business outcomes with cloud automation
The majority of JUCY's business comes from global travel aggregators. These are websites or travel agencies that attract customers by finding prices across multiple sources, and bringing them together in a comparative one-stop shop. In pre-Covid days, such businesses would contact the JUCY call center to order a booking with a JUCY team member, then wait up to 24 hours for a confirmation email to arrive, which is common practice amongst most RV rental operators.
The picture changed after JUCY carried out digital transformation with Google Cloud. From call center staff relying on a single physical server for availability and pricing information, JUCY's entire sales and customer service operations moved to two fully automated apps. These are an online booking service and a customer self-service portal. Both are built with Firebase as JUCY's serverless app development tool. The services are powered by App Engine for unlimited microservices-based auto scaling, to meet spikes and troughs in demand in real time.
"Firebase is such an agile and easy-to-use, scalable app builder that we were able to prototype and launch the JUCY online platform quickly at a time of great need," says Corey Sewell, Senior Developer, JUCY. "Then we could send out updates just as easily to meet customer needs in real time, especially as business rebounded."
"With Google Cloud, we were able to lower our computing budgets dramatically when Covid hit, running on the bare minimum due to reduced load, instead of paying for an idling physical server. Now that business has rebounded, we can just as easily spin up resources."
—Corey Sewell, Senior Developer, JUCYAs a result, 97% of JUCY sales are made with zero human intervention on the JUCY side, thanks to the sophisticated range of APIs Sewell's team has built with Firebase. Meanwhile, the overnight wait for email booking confirmation has given way to instant confirmation through the JUCY online platform.
Now that business has returned to pre-Covid levels, JUCY has made a bold move to acquire the Star RV campervan rental business. Thanks to the unlimited auto scaling capabilities of App Engine, says Simmons, JUCY has been able to absorb the load of seeing its fleet expand "without skipping a beat."
"With Google Cloud, we were able to lower our computing budgets dramatically when Covid hit, running on the bare minimum due to reduced load, instead of paying for an idling physical server," says Sewell. "Now that business has rebounded, we can just as easily spin up resources, enjoying not only auto scaling with zero resource provisioning, but cost savings because we only pay for what we use."
Building back the business on BigQuery-driven data analytics
To rebuild stronger, JUCY felt it needed to turn itself into a data-driven business for core operations. These include fleet placement, price optimization, and targeted marketing. That meant scalable real-time data analytics from sources as diverse as agency sales patterns, customer keyword searches, and data from far-flung branches on the best performing vehicles.
BigQuery as JUCY's autoscaling data warehouse processes these diverse data streams in real-time with unlimited scale to enable the team to make precision strategy decisions. This intelligence is channeled into Looker Studio for intuitive, easy-to-read business reports that enable the JUCY leadership team to make calls on pricing, offers, sales, marketing, and more, with real time impact.
"Two years ago we were blind on data. Now we're building back on data," says Simmons. "The instant business intelligence enabled by BigQuery is underpinning not only our business performance, it has become our enterprise culture itself. This genuinely drives our future."
"Two years ago we were blind on data. Now we're building back on data," says Simmons. "The real-time business intelligence enabled by BigQuery is underpinning not only our business performance, it has become our enterprise culture itself. This genuinely drives our future."
—Dave Simmons, Head of Revenue, JUCYOne of the main benefits of BigQuery has been driving optimization of JUCY's customer self-service portal. This solution enables users to carry out tasks, such as entering their address and uploading their drivers license, for check-in before branch pickup. With BigQuery, JUCY is able to obtain instant snapshots on app performance and adoption, by driving aggregated data on how customers are engaging with it, including through social media, emails, and QR code capture.
For example, BigQuery data analytics can show which branches are attracting the most customer self-service users, and which agency partners are promoting it most strongly. That enables JUCY to carry out data-driven app improvements, and strategic branch and marketing adjustments, to bring more customers online.
With BigQuery data analytics, more than 60% of JUCY customers are now checking in online before their branch visit, enabling time and cost efficiencies, while driving better customer experiences.
"The popularity of customer self-service portal, thanks to optimizations made possible by BigQuery has massive implications," says Simmons. "Checking in online is a far better experience for our customers. As proof, net promoter scores have jumped sharply since launching the portal built with Firebase, and driven by App Engine."
Welcoming back the world with Google Cloud AI solutions
Now that JUCY sees a brighter business horizon, it is "super excited" about re-launching expansion plans. To drive the strategy, it envisions AI-driven solutions to better gauge such factors as growth market intelligence and product rollout optimization for maximum impact.
It also foresees building AI models for pricing decisions based on internal demand forecasting and aggregated competitor pricing data. For this new phase, the firm envisions adoption of Google Cloud ML and AI solutions, such as BigQuery ML and Tensorflow, to bring real-time precision insight for global growth strategy.
"We are a business built on a passion for welcoming the world to New Zealand and Australia," says Simmons. "Now that we're able to return to this with open arms, Google Cloud can help us open unlimited possibilities in our quest to build unforgettable road trips for adventure lovers everywhere."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About JUCY
JUCY is a New Zealand campervan and car rental brand on a mission to enable road trips that enable travelers to discover their happiness through a spirit of passion, pride, family, and fun. Founded in 2001 by brothers Dan and Tim Alpe, JUCY has grown to deploy more than 2,000 vehicles across 10 locations around Australasia, and has welcomed travelers from more than 150 countries. The founders have road trips in their DNA, following in the footsteps of their father Chris Alpe, a motorhome tourism pioneer, and their grandfather Bob Alpe, a travel agency owner. JUCY is an eight-time winner of the Golden Backpacker Award, and a recipient of the 2021 New Zealand Reader Digest Quality Service Award.