Vacation Innovations is a trailblazer in travel technology and member loyalty solutions. With a portfolio of over 12 brands — including a secondary marketplace for timeshares, a licensed brokerage firm specializing in timeshares, and an award-winning travel loyalty platform — the company has a lot of moving parts. Chief Marketing Officer, Abigail Whitaker, leads a team managing everything from brand identity and lead generation to customer lifecycle and reputation management. When their previous marketing platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, began holding them back, she knew it was time for a change. 

Marketing for multiple brands with unique needs and with a lean team is no small feat, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud wasn’t making it any easier. The marketing team often had to wait on IT to handle basic tasks like updating data extensions or building segments, which slowed everything down. “We really had to rely on a full-time Salesforce Marketing Cloud admin to do a lot of the work that the team wanted to be able to do themselves,” Whitaker shared. “It was limiting in our ability to move quickly as an organization, which is something that we prioritize in every aspect of our business and take pride in.”   

The costs were piling up, too. On top of hefty renewal fees that increased every year, Vacation Innovations was paying for an extra CRM license just to make their data accessible for some business lines. Meanwhile, Salesforce customer success often felt more focused on upselling during renewal periods than problem-solving. "One of the most frustrating things for us was we couldn’t go directly to Salesforce to get assistance with custom requests or build-outs... they were always pushing their third-party vendors," explained Whitaker.  

Ultimately, the costs outweighed the value. “The cost was getting more and more extravagant to the point where we questioned if we were making back what we had invested in the system,” she said. Despite knowing the platform wasn’t going to work for Vacation Innovations, the idea of migrating to a new system felt daunting. That’s when they discovered Acoustic. 

Partnering with Acoustic turned out to be “a breath of fresh air.” From day one, Whitaker and her team experienced a hands-on onboarding process that exceeded their expectations. “The Acoustic team really went above and beyond to get us what we needed and to solve all of our problems as they came up,” Whitaker said. “They were willing to put in that time, including going down some rabbit holes to find actual solutions for some of our more challenging use cases. It really meant a lot and made us more confident in our decision,” she added. Thanks to Acoustic’s in-house experts, the company completed their migration in just six months — all while maintaining business operations.   

Acoustic also delivered the flexibility needed to manage Vacation Innovations’ complex data infrastructure. With multiple CRMs, including a homegrown system, integration could have been a headache. Instead, Acoustic made it seamless. The email team quickly gained tools to work more independently, building segments and creating custom dashboards without relying on IT or SQL expertise. 

Switching to Acoustic Connect gave the Vacation Innovations marketing team the freedom to manage their own campaigns — no more waiting on IT or external consultants to create new segments or update contact lists. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, even simple tasks required SQL expertise. Now, the team can handle everything themselves, making campaign execution and reporting faster and more efficient. “We have the ability to create custom email dashboards as well without that costing us more money, which was a big problem with Salesforce,” Whitaker noted. 

Bringing their data together in one place has been another game-changer. Managing a homegrown CRM came with challenges, including having to replicate data in Salesforce in order to make it available in Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the team to use. Now, when they update records in Acoustic Connect or in any internal CRM, those changes sync back automatically. “Having all our CRM data available in Acoustic Connect will be incredibly helpful. Being able to use that data for both reporting and potentially for segmentation is something that we’ve never had the ability to do before,” said Whitaker.  This level of integration has made data management smoother and more reliable and allowed the team to have more control over how they use their data in campaigns. 

The team also now had the tools to stay on top of email deliverability. With better visibility into contact list health and detailed deliverability metrics, the team could take control of their database like never before. They quickly identified and suppressed bad emails, ensuring clean lists and protecting their sender reputation. “The information on deliverability is much better in Acoustic than with our previous platform,” Whitaker shared. “[The team is] able to maintain a cleaner database for email and manage our sending reputation, which has improved because of that reporting access. We also recently added additional services related to email deliverability with Acoustic, and we’re already seeing incremental value from having access to their expertise in that area.”   

Beyond the capabilities, the team found Acoustic Connect incredibly easy to use. The platform’s intuitive interface meant they could hit the ground running — without the steep learning curve they had faced with other tools. Instead of spending weeks navigating complex workflows, they were able to jump right in and start building campaigns, analyzing data, and refining their strategies. The easy-to-use platform also helped them reduce the time it took to complete simple marketing tasks, allowing them to make changes or generate new contact lists right away instead of waiting days for IT assistance.  

For Whitaker, the greatest value of partnering with Acoustic has been the relationship itself. “We were hopeful that Acoustic would be a different kind of partner for us... we were looking for a true partner who could help us achieve our goals rather than just a provider when we moved platforms, and that has proven to be true with Acoustic,” she shared. From onboarding to ongoing support, Acoustic’s team has consistently been flexible, available, and invested in Vacation Innovations’ success.