Increased margins by 25% and added new revenue streams
Became the company's most popular analytics tier
Retained Annual Recurring Revenue of more than $100,000
By choosing Looker, Lighthouse supplemented its analytics strategy from a prescriptive model to a flexible, scalable, AI-ready platform and launched BI Pro. This new tier has driven new revenue, improved margins, and expanded Lighthouse's market reach.
By choosing Looker, Lighthouse supplemented its analytics strategy from a prescriptive model to a flexible, scalable, AI-ready platform and launched BI Pro. This new tier has driven new revenue, improved margins, and expanded Lighthouse's market reach.
Build versus buy for embedded analytics
Lighthouse, a global leader in hospitality technology, has long been known for its purpose-built tools that empower hotel commercial teams to optimize performance in a highly perishable inventory environment. With over 900 employees and a customer base spanning 80,000 hotel properties worldwide, Lighthouse's mission is to make data actionable for hoteliers.
Every day, the company handles tens of millions of hotel and short-term listings and processes greater than 100 terabytes of raw data. Lighthouse's software is designed for the commercial teams within hotels—revenue managers, sales leaders, marketers, and general managers—who must optimize room sales daily. "Hotel inventory is perfectly perishable," explains Gregory Peppel, Vice President of Product for Chains and Groups at Lighthouse. "If you don't sell a room today, you can't sell it tomorrow. So every day matters."
Lighthouse built highly prescriptive, data-driven tools that integrate with property management systems, central reservation systems, and web crawlers that collect competitive rate data. These products are tailored to the daily routines of hotel teams, helping them make fast, informed decisions. However, customer expectations evolved and demand for flexible, self-service analytics grew. Peppel notes, "Our customers started saying, 'You have all this great data, but I want to extend it to solve even more problems.'" This demand for flexible, ad hoc analytics pushed Lighthouse to supplement its approach.
We believe AI only works if the data model is sound. Looker let us build on top of what we already had, rather than duplicating efforts.
Gregory Peppel
Vice President of Product for Chains and Groups, Lighthouse
Lighthouse faced a pivotal decision: build a custom reporting solution or partner with a best-in-class business intelligence (BI) platform. "We could spend another decade building a reporting capability, or we could partner with someone who already had a roadmap and knew how this worked," Peppel says.
Launching BI Pro: A premium analytics tier
After a rigorous RFP process and proof-of-concept testing with several vendors, Looker emerged as the clear winner. Peppel cites three core reasons for choosing Looker:
- Superior user experience: "End users preferred Looker's interface. It was intuitive and powerful."
- Flexible data modeling: "Our developers found that Looker anticipated our needs. Role-level security, semantic modeling—it was all there, ready to configure, not customize."
- AI and conversational analytics roadmap: "We saw a clear commitment to innovation. Looker's roadmap aligned with our vision for AI-driven analytics."
Lighthouse was particularly impressed by Looker's semantic modeling capabilities. "We believe AI only works if the data model is sound," Peppel explains. "Looker let us build on top of what we already had, rather than duplicating efforts."
With Looker at the core, Lighthouse launched a new premium analytics offering: BI Pro. This tier targets larger hotel groups and management companies with dedicated analytics teams.
Key features of BI Pro include embedded Looker dashboards, custom report building, visual galleries of metrics and KPIs, and "Made for you" templates to ease onboarding. Importantly, Lighthouse sells BI Pro by hotel property—not by user license. "That's how hotels buy," says Peppel. "We didn't want to change our sales model." The marquee feature of BI Pro is Custom Reporting, which is designed to drive revenue with enterprise and large chain customers. Custom Reporting allows users to create, export, and schedule personalized reports and dashboards. With pre-sourced data, a pre-built data model, and multiple editable report templates that include essential metrics, users can start generating valuable insights faster.
We're winning deals we never would have been in before. Looker unlocked new markets for us.
Gregory Peppel
Vice President of Product for Chains and Groups, Lighthouse
Growing margins and finding new revenue streams
For Lighthouse, the results of launching BI Pro have been impressive. It is now the company's most popular analytics tier, surpassing expectations in midmarket adoption. The solution is also leading to higher margins, new revenue streams, and increased net revenue retention by as much as $100,000. "We're winning deals we never would have been in before," Peppel says. "Looker unlocked new markets for us." BI Pro is also enabling faster time to insight, with customers who struggled for years with Power BI able to model complex hotel metrics like "pace" within weeks using Looker.
One of the most challenging analytics problems in hospitality is modeling the "pace curve"—a matrix of booking data that compares current performance to historical benchmarks. "Most BI tools can't handle it," says Peppel. "We used it as our proof-of-concept test. Customers told us they'd tried for years to model pace in Power BI and failed. With Looker's semantic layer, we nailed it."
This ability to handle complex, industry-specific use cases gave Lighthouse a competitive edge and reinforced its decision to invest in Looker.
Lighthouse sees Looker not just as a reporting tool, but as a foundation for AI-powered analytics. "We're excited about conversational analytics," says Peppel. "It democratizes data access. General managers can ask simple questions and get answers without going through a revenue manager." This shift reduces bottlenecks and increases data literacy across hotel teams. "Our revenue managers are data-savvy—they'll keep using detailed reports. But for everyone else, conversational analytics is a game-changer." Peppel also notes Looker's alignment with Google's broader AI strategy. "We trust Google's scale and commitment to innovation. Other vendors had flashy demos, but poor data modeling. That's not sustainable."
Looking ahead, Lighthouse is exploring additional Looker capabilities, including:
- Looker Studio: To automate the creation of collaboration artifacts like slide decks and flash reports.
- Conversational analytics API: For embedding natural language queries directly into Lighthouse's platform.
- Continuous Integration: To support governance and validation in bring-your-own-data (BYOD) scenarios.
As Peppel puts it: "Looker didn't just meet our needs—it anticipated them. It's helped us move faster, serve our customers better, and prepare for the future of analytics."
Lighthouse is the AI commercial operating system for the travel and hospitality industry, purpose-built to help hotels optimize pricing, distribution, marketing, and performance management.
Industry: Travel and Hospitality
Location: North America
Products: Google Cloud, Looker
