Holiday Tours
Company Size
11-200
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Samsara Vehicle Gateways
- Samsara dual-facing HD dash cams
- Samsara Driver App
Tech Stack
- GPS Tracking
- Real-time Location Data
- Fault Code Alerts
- Electronic DVIRs
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Employee Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Functional Applications - Fleet Management Systems (FMS)
- Sensors - GPS
Applicable Industries
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Driver Performance Monitoring
- Fleet Management
- Predictive Maintenance
- Vehicle Telematics
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Founded in 1978, Holiday Tours is a family-owned-and-operated charter bus company based in North Carolina. The company operates a fleet of 74 motorcoaches and specializes in private charter services and preset tour packages. Known for their high level of customer service, safety record, and innovation, Holiday Tours has always recognized the importance of technology in their operations. They built their own system in the 1980s to manage various aspects of their business, including customer reservations, scheduling, maintenance, accounting, and HR. However, they were missing a crucial component: real-time tracking of their buses. This gap in their system made it challenging to provide accurate updates to customers and manage their fleet efficiently.
The Challenge
Holiday Tours, a family-owned charter bus company, faced challenges in managing their fleet operations efficiently. Despite having a custom-built system for managing customer reservations, scheduling, maintenance, accounting, and HR, they lacked a way to accurately pinpoint the location of their buses. This gap in their system made it difficult to provide real-time updates to customers about bus locations, which was particularly problematic in city environments where a two-minute delay could mean a difference of 10 blocks. Additionally, their existing camera system only collected harsh driving events in large batches during the evening, limiting their ability to provide instant feedback on driver behavior and customer experience. The company also needed a more efficient way to manage maintenance, as motorcoaches require regular maintenance to deal with diesel particulates through a process called regeneration. Not performing regeneration on time could cause the vehicle to stop, posing a significant operational risk.
The Solution
To address these challenges, Holiday Tours deployed Samsara Vehicle Gateways to add GPS tracking to their fleet. This allowed them to have real-time location data for every vehicle, significantly improving their ability to provide accurate updates to customers. The company also invested in Samsara dual-facing HD dash cams to get a full picture of what was happening on the road. This enabled them to see harsh driving events as they happened, providing instant feedback on driver behavior and customer experience. Additionally, Samsara's fault code alerts notified the team when regeneration was needed for their motorcoaches, even before the bus dash indicator lit up. This proactive approach allowed them to notify drivers to get to a safe area for maintenance, preventing potential operational disruptions. The Samsara Driver App further streamlined their maintenance management by enabling electronic DVIRs, moving them from a paper-based system to a fully electronic workflow. This instant communication improved clarity of information and coordination between departments, saving the team at least 10 hours a week.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Airport SCADA Systems Improve Service Levels
Modern airports are one of the busiest environments on Earth and rely on process automation equipment to ensure service operators achieve their KPIs. Increasingly airport SCADA systems are being used to control all aspects of the operation and associated facilities. This is because unplanned system downtime can cost dearly, both in terms of reduced revenues and the associated loss of customer satisfaction due to inevitable travel inconvenience and disruption.
Case Study
IoT-based Fleet Intelligence Innovation
Speed to market is precious for DRVR, a rapidly growing start-up company. With a business model dependent on reliable mobile data, managers were spending their lives trying to negotiate data roaming deals with mobile network operators in different countries. And, even then, service quality was a constant concern.
Case Study
Digitize Railway with Deutsche Bahn
To reduce maintenance costs and delay-causing failures for Deutsche Bahn. They need manual measurements by a position measurement system based on custom-made MEMS sensor clusters, which allow autonomous and continuous monitoring with wireless data transmission and long battery. They were looking for data pre-processing solution in the sensor and machine learning algorithms in the cloud so as to detect critical wear.
Case Study
Cold Chain Transportation and Refrigerated Fleet Management System
1) Create a digital connected transportation solution to retrofit cold chain trailers with real-time tracking and controls. 2) Prevent multi-million dollar losses due to theft or spoilage. 3) Deliver a digital chain-of-custody solution for door to door load monitoring and security. 4) Provide a trusted multi-fleet solution in a single application with granular data and access controls.
Case Study
Vehicle Fleet Analytics
Organizations frequently implement a maintenance strategy for their fleets of vehicles using a combination of time and usage based maintenance schedules. While effective as a whole, time and usage based schedules do not take into account driving patterns, environmental factors, and sensors currently deployed within the vehicle measuring crank voltage, ignition voltage, and acceleration, all of which have a significant influence on the overall health of the vehicle.In a typical fleet, a large percentage of road calls are related to electrical failure, with battery failure being a common cause. Battery failures result in unmet service agreement levels and costly re-adjustment of scheduled to provide replacement vehicles. To reduce the impact of unplanned maintenance, the transportation logistics company was interested in a trial of C3 Vehicle Fleet Analytics.
Case Study
3M Gains Real-Time Insight with Cloud Solution
The company has a long track record of innovative technology solutions. For example, 3M helps its customers optimize parking operations by automating fee collection and other processes. To improve support for this rapidly expanding segment, 3M needed to automate its own data collection and reporting. The company had recently purchased the assets of parking, tolling, and automatic license plate reader businesses, and required better insight into these acquisitions. Chad Reed, Global Business Manager for 3M Parking Systems, says, “With thousands of installations across the world, we couldn’t keep track of our software and hardware deployments, which made it difficult to understand our market penetration.” 3M wanted a tracking application that sales staff could use to get real-time information about the type and location of 3M products in parking lots and garages. So that it could be used on-site with potential customers, the solution would have to provide access to data anytime, anywhere, and from an array of mobile devices. Jason Fox, Mobile Application Architect at 3M, upped the ante by volunteering to deliver the new app in one weekend. For Fox and his team, these requirements meant turning to the cloud instead of an on-premises datacenter. “My first thought was to go directly to the cloud because we needed to provide access not only to our salespeople, but to resellers who didn’t have access to our internal network,” says Fox. “The cloud just seemed like a logical choice.”
