Vacation Innovations (VI) has built a strong reputation as a developer of award-winning, travel-related programs and technology, producing some of the most sophisticated software and user interfaces in the travel industry. VI’s IT team is the cornerstone of the organization, consistently embodying the company’s core values of service and innovation. For over three decades, VI has relied on this team’s expertise to achieve ambitious goals and drive groundbreaking advancements. VI’s IT team has previously earned multiple accolades for “Best Technology” from industry awards programs, including the GNEX Vacation Industry Awards.
Supporting VI’s internal teams across three office locations and over 2 million members across multiple brands, this team excels in both responsiveness and strategic vision. One of the team’s most impactful achievements is the development of the technology underpinning Vacation Innovations’ award-winning maintenance fee reimbursement program. This groundbreaking program enhances timeshare owners’ overall experience with vacation ownership, while ensuring maintenance fees are paid and supporting the financial health and sustainability of timeshare owners’ associations. To date, the program has delivered over $6 million in cash reimbursements to timeshare owners unable to use their intervals or points. By creating the robust inventory and customer service management systems necessary for the backend of this program, VI’s IT team enabled exponential growth, with reimbursements increasing over 800% from 2023 to 2024.
With thousands of unique resorts and inventory types, VI’s IT team had to design a system capable of blending complex inventory management with customer service functionality in a single, user-friendly application. Despite the intricate requirements, they delivered a solution that was on time, on budget, and required minimal refinements post-launch. In 2024 alone, this system facilitated the processing of over 3,300 deposits, resulting in $5.4 million in reimbursements to timeshare owners. This system also leverages built-in AI to forecast optimal reservation bookings and marketing windows, enhancing inventory utilization. This achievement exemplifies this team’s innovative approach to solving complex challenges, combining technical mastery with a deep understanding of stakeholder and customer needs.
Building on its early success in adopting AI technologies, in 2024 VI’s IT team launched a full-scale in-house Artificial Intelligence program by developing a proprietary AI system named VINCE. Hosted on a local server with a GPU card for AI processing, and running on a secure Linux Ubuntu platform, VINCE operates within a closed model based on the OpenAI framework, ensuring data security with no external internet access. Since its implementation, VINCE has already revolutionized operations, saving the IT team approximately 100 hours of labor per month through streamlined processes and automation.
One of VINCE’s most impactful contributions was addressing VI’s challenge with resort images. VI’s database contained over 120,000 resort images that were too small or of inferior quality, hindering user experience on the company’s booking websites. Previously, resolving this issue was costly and time-consuming. VINCE upscaled all remaining images in just two weeks, delivering a 99% cost reduction and dramatically improving user experience across all member platforms and booking websites.
Looking ahead, VI’s IT team is expanding VINCE’s capabilities to include troubleshooting code, further optimizing inventory management, enhancing personalization and automation, implementing AI agents to better serve the organization’s growing client base, and delivering advanced data analytics through comprehensive statistical analysis. These forward-thinking initiatives demonstrate the IT team’s ability to solve complex challenges through innovative technology, improving efficiency, reducing costs, and empowering stakeholders.
In 2024, VI’s IT team also played a pivotal role in transforming the organization’s email marketing capabilities by helping the marketing team complete an email platform migration. With a tight six-month timeline, this team delivered extraordinary results. VI’s IT team successfully replicated two distinct CRMs, configured 13 custom sending domains, and assisted in the migration of hundreds of queries, email campaigns and marketing automations. This seamless migration ensured that the marketing team maintained full sending capacity during the transition, avoiding any interruptions to critical campaign sends. Moreover, the IT team’s efforts empowered the marketing team to operate more independently by enabling them to manage audience creation, data extensions, and other key tasks without reliance on external contractors. This enhanced team efficiency and resulted in significant cost savings for the organization.
VI’s IT team sets a gold standard for customer service to internal stakeholders, embodying the organization’s commitment to service and excellence. Their proactive, solution-oriented approach ensures that internal teams are empowered to achieve their goals more effectively and contributes directly to the company’s financial achievements, including record-high revenue in 2024 with an impressive 9% year-over-year growth. Through their unwavering dedication to innovation, technological excellence, and stakeholder satisfaction, Vacation Innovations’ IT team has significantly advanced its mission to innovate and lead in the vacation ownership industry and is truly deserving of the GNEX Vacation Industry Award for Best Team.
