Valamar Riviera drives call center sales up by €20 million with Fabric

Today’s hospitality leaders face the pressures of unpredictable demand in a largely seasonal business, labor shortages that threaten service levels and drive wage increases, and operating in an already highly competitive industry. Additionally, they must compete with app-based home share services that can lure away younger travelers.

Valamar is a leading tourism company that manages hotels, resorts, and camping resorts in top tourist destinations along the Adriatic coast. These destinations include Poreč and Rabac; the islands of Krk, Rab, and Hvar; Makarska and Dubrovnik; and Obertauern, Austria. Valamar’s strength lies in delivering exceptional guest experiences to the nearly 58,000 guests it hosts daily, across a network of 36 hotels and resorts and 15 camping resorts. However, aging systems, data silos, and manual processes meant that optimizing customer-facing technology often took a backseat to patching up the infrastructure. This led to a range of issues affecting customer service and revenue.

The company’s call center and check-in platforms were increasingly prone to technical issues, including payment gateway failures and intermittent outages, frustrating guests and staff alike. Troubleshooting these issues was slow, as system health and incident resolution lacked transparency.

In the call center, limited access to data meant that tracking and managing worker performance was challenging. Likewise, Valamar’s laundry and linen operations—responsible for processing millions of towels and linens annually—struggled to control labor and energy costs, leading to inefficiencies and budget overruns due to fragmented cost and volume data.

Across the company, siloed data and limited visibility into operations slowed response times, creating challenges to delivering the kind of seamless personalized service that guests expect.

Envisioning the future of hospitality

Recognizing the need for a unified, real-time view of operations, Valamar’s leadership set out to transform the company into a truly data-driven organization. “Our goal was to deliver unbelievable service and create long-lasting guest relationships driven by technology, data analytics, and employees,” says Valamar Riviera’s Director of Digitalization, Roberto Gobo. “Even in IT, our guests are the first consideration, followed by employees, technology, data, and analytics.”

To realize its vision, Valamar identified several key criteria for its ideal data and analytics platform. These included a centralized, scalable data hub capable of capturing and sharing data across all divisions and properties, with real-time insights from all systems and devices. Integrated AI and machine learning was also required to support automated processes and predictive analytics. The solution needed to break down silos, unify disparate data sources, and provide a single source of truth for decision-making. It had to be robust enough to handle the scale and complexity of Valamar’s operations, yet flexible enough to adapt to evolving business needs and regulatory requirements.

“The real-time element is very important, because we need to be able to react instantly when our payment system isn’t working or when clients have problems with the check-in process,” Gobo explains.

Security and compliance were equally critical. As a hospitality leader, Valamar processes sensitive information, including credit card and personal data for millions of guests. The company needed a platform that could ensure data privacy, meet stringent regulatory standards such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and provide end-to-end protection against cyberthreats.

Valamar’s journey toward intelligent operations reached a turning point with the launch of a pilot project in partnership with Cloud Services, a leading Microsoft partner based in Central and Eastern Europe. After a rigorous evaluation, Microsoft Fabric emerged as the ideal solution to meet Valamar’s analytics and real-time intelligence requirements.

The collaborative spirit and adaptability that Microsoft and Cloud Services brought to the table were key. “A major advantage Microsoft has is in its local presence,” says Gobo. “When you have challenges, you can always get someone in front of you who can help.” 

Unleashing real-time intelligence

At the core of Valamar Riviera’s Fabric solution is OneLake, a unified data lake that serves as a single, highly secure repository for all operational, guest, and IoT data. By breaking down silos, democratizing access to data, and empowering cross-functional collaboration, OneLake enables every department and property to tap into real-time insights, regardless of location or function.

Valamar’s operations are now monitored and managed through a suite of real-time dashboards and Power BI reports that use Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. Additionally, people across the company use Copilot to interact with the data by asking questions in natural language. These tools help provide instant visibility into system health, equipment status, and guest-facing processes. For example, if a payment gateway fails or a check-in platform goes offline, the system triggers an immediate alert, allowing IT and operations teams to troubleshoot and resolve issues before they affect guests.

The Fabric solution also extends deep into Valamar’s laundry and linen operations, so management can import, connect, and analyze data from multiple platforms. Using intuitive dashboards to visualize insights, Valamar laundry and finance teams can quickly and efficiently forecast demand, optimize staffing, and reduce energy costs.

In front-office operations, integrated AI and machine learning models can now analyze historical and real-time data to identify trends, predict surges in guest demand, and recommend proactive interventions. For example, the system can forecast when a spike in check-ins is likely to occur, allowing Valamar to adjust staffing and resources accordingly. 

Delivering security, compliance, and intelligence

Built on Microsoft Azure, the Fabric solution provides enterprise-grade security, compliance, and scalability. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit, with robust access controls and auditing to help ensure compliance with GDPR and other regulations. The platform scales effortlessly as Valamar expands its portfolio, supporting new properties, services, and data sources without disruption.

With Fabric delivering a single source of truth for Valamar’s leadership, operations, and IT teams, executives can track business insights in real time. Operations managers can drill down into cost drivers and performance metrics, and IT teams have the tools to monitor system health and respond to incidents instantly. The result is a culture of data-driven decision-making, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

According to Patrik Krcelic, Data Scientist at Valamar Riviera, the most difficult part of the transformation was figuring out which Fabric enhancements to incorporate next. “Once we implemented, our goal was keeping up with the new Fabric features being rolled out,” he says. “Staying on top of them kept us busy, but it was worth it as Microsoft was adding new capabilities that deliver better performance and lower cost.” 

Automating processes, optimizing operations 

Since implementing the Fabric-based solution, Valamar Riviera has seen processes transformed across the company. Real-time visibility into operational systems is fostering agility and enabling proactive interventions that prevent equipment failures and help ensure a seamless guest journey. The solution has also cut operational costs by identifying inefficiencies, anticipating staffing and maintenance needs, and adjusting service supply to match demand.

Where historical data was inaccessible, laundry managers can now call up six years of data to enable accurate budgeting and performance improvement. Automation and real-time reporting have dramatically reduced the need for manual reconciliation and troubleshooting, freeing staff to focus on high-impact guest services and strategic initiatives.

Call center performance has improved significantly, delivering shorter wait times for customers and greater profitability for Valamar. “We increased sales in our call center while decreasing call duration nearly three minutes, which translates to more than 1,500 agent days in a year or 156,000 more calls per year from the same number of people,” explains Vesna Otocan, Reservation Centre Department Director at Valamar. “With a 16% conversion rate, that’s 20,000 reservations—20 million euros’ more impact. And we achieved this in two months instead of a year.” 

Adds Gobo, “We’ve also increased the percentage of inbound call responses from 88% to 98% and the percentage of answered emails from 70% to 99%.”

Marketing spend can now be optimized through deeper insights into guest behavior, booking patterns, and campaign performance. Targeted campaigns yield higher conversion rates, improved revenue yields, and more efficient allocation of marketing budgets. “We send about 100 million emails per year,” says Gobo. “We’ve connected events from our website with campaign IDs, so we can track unique users and revenue per campaign. Also, it puts us in a position to reallocate spending to the most effective campaigns almost instantly.”

By automating routine tasks and providing real-time insights, Valamar is enhancing the work environment for its staff, reducing stress, and enabling more meaningful engagement with guests. Operational efficiencies and predictive analytics help support stable, year-round staffing, even in a highly seasonal industry.

While all Valamar Riviera’s performance gains are impressive, the supervisory board was focused on ROI. “We were happy to share with them that ROI was in the neighborhood of 101% to 130% over 9 to 12 months,” Gobo notes.

A plan for continuous data-driven innovation

Across Valamar Riviera, unified data and AI are enabling new guest services, sustainability initiatives, confident expansion into new markets, and a culture of continuous improvement. The company is now using Fabric to support its strategic objectives for fiscal year 2026 and beyond, including expanding its marketing database, with the goal of having every third guest be a return visitor. It will also begin testing automated real-time reallocation of marketing funds to its most successful social media campaigns.

Valamar Riviera’s Fabric journey demonstrates what’s possible when an organization embraces intelligent operations, unified data, and AI-driven innovation. The company didn’t just solve its immediate operational challenges—it built a model for the future of intelligent hospitality.

“What’s most beneficial about Fabric is that it’s an all-in-one platform. You have connectors to bring in the data and you have databases, real-time analytics, and AI. For companies like ours that don’t have a deep R&D or development focus, what’s most relevant is that we can do more work much faster—with fewer people to maintain it all. Time to market of our digital services is critical, and Fabric enables that,” Gobo concludes.

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