Hotel booking site Trivago powers collaboration with Dropbox

Hotel booking site Trivago has deployed 1,300 Dropbox Business accounts to power its business, spanning 55 markets around the world.

As part of its expansion, which includes a new HQ campus in Dusseldorf that will hold 2,000 people, Trivago needed a content collaboration platform that all its employees could use to keep teams in sync.

A key factor in choosing Dropbox was its integration with Microsoft Office 365.

The company conducted trials and worked with employees on identifying the cloud-based collaboration platform they felt would best fit their needs. It found high adoption in Dropbox, which was a key factor, and Dropbox for Business complemented the Office 365 package that had already been deployed.

“We see ourselves as a fast-growing technology company that is serving businesses and consumers around the globe and across the hotel search sector, and we want to equip our talented employees with the best tools possible,” said Sian Williams, ‎organisational solutions manager at Trivago.

“Dropbox and Office 365 work seamlessly with each other, and that integration was instrumental in a smooth deployment. People were actively wanting to take part in the trial, and we saw a huge uptake in uploading and sharing files via Dropbox, so we immediately knew we had struck a chord with our employees,” she said.

One of the key priorities was bringing the company together. “When it came to deploy, we had a ‘Dropbox Day’, which went well and brought a buzz into the company,” said Williams. “We are seeing rapid growth in Dropbox usage, and we have a Slack group dedicated to Dropbox learning and best practice, which shows the team ethic we have at Trivago.”

Deploying effective collaboration tools can prove a major challenge for IT departments used to big-bang roll-outs, where new systems are deployed over the weekend, ready for users at the start of the next working week.

At a recent Computer Weekly CW500 Club event, Steve Mellors, collaboration programme manager at the Wellcome Trust, said: “You could put the best infrastructure up there and it won’t be used. People will always find a way around it if they’re not incentivised, if there’s no desire and there’s nothing in it for them.”

People tend to use what they are used to, which means some cloud-based collaboration tools end up being used outside of IT’s control. For success, Mellors urged CIOs to empathise with their users.