Why Kalibri chose Astrato: customer-facing analytics without the engineering tax

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Kalibri: the hospitality industry’s profit engine

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Kalibri is a hospitality data analytics company that helps hotels and hotel brands optimize their business mix to maximize profit. The company ingests vast volumes of performance data – spending, revenue, market composition – and distills it through proprietary algorithms into actionable strategy, delivered via a SaaS platform.

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“We’re looking at all the data we can of how hotels are spending their money and what money is coming in the door, so that we can show them where they’ve got a real opportunity to go after market share.” – Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri

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Kalibri sells four products under its Hummingbird brand — from on-property performance benchmarking to market-level investment analysis, custom reports, and enterprise data offerings — all built on Snowflake and underpinned by a technology team of roughly 30 engineers, data scientists, and analysts.

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The problem: How to make valuable data easier to act upon

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Hospitality is a complex, regulated industry. Two hotels on the same street compete fiercely, yet both need market-level benchmarking data to make informed decisions. Kalibri’s algorithms solve the data problem, but delivering those insights in a way that busy hotel teams could use efficiently and easily was a bigger challenge.

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The company was investing significant effort building custom Excel workbooks and static reports for clients. But as analyst teams across the hospitality industry have grown leaner, fewer people on the receiving end had the skills needed to interpret data exports or connect them to the right strategic context.

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“As analyst teams have gotten smaller, fewer people knew how to interpret the data we were sending. If they didn’t understand the value our data provided, they might be pulling in the wrong data set or evaluating something totally unrelated to where our value really shines.” –Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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Kalibri needed to shift from shipping static files to delivering live, interactive dashboards that any revenue manager could explore without special analytical expertise — and they needed to do it without diverting their engineering team from the products already in the market.

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“There’s no reason for our teams to be building an Excel workbook if we can automate that and export that, even back down to an Excel, but also giving them a dashboard to go look at.” – Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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An unexpected discovery: embedded BI

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Kalibri wasn’t looking for a BI tool. The team knew it needed a new data product to round out its portfolio, and the default plan was to build it from scratch. But Graham quickly saw the trade-offs.

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“I started doing the math. We could build this, but at what cost for our other products that we need to keep updating and those customers that we need to keep serving? I couldn’t just pause work on three of our products to go build this instead. The question was, how do I do both?” – Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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The turning point came during a conversation with a partner company. Graham noticed that the back end of their product was powered by an embedded BI platform — an approach he had never considered.

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“I’d never even considered embedded BI as an approach. But once I started doing the research, I realised I could achieve the same roadmap without disrupting a full engineering team to build a BI solution from scratch.” – Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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That insight reframed the entire project. Rather than diverting engineers from four active products to build custom tooling, Kalibri could layer an embedded analytics platform on top of its existing Snowflake infrastructure – no data duplication, no new ETL pipelines, no separate data stack to maintain.

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The team did have Looker in place, but was using it primarily as a data extraction layer, not as a full BI platform and certainly not for customer-facing analytics. Looker could query Snowflake but embedding it for customers would have meant building and maintaining a separate, white-labelled application — effectively duplicating the product. That was precisely the kind of engineering overhead the team was trying to avoid.

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“If we didn’t need a customer-facing application, we would have stayed with Looker. It wasn’t perfect for our needs, but it was doing enough. The whole intent was, can we find a tool that can give us both for the price point that we need?” – Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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The requirements crystallised: a BI platform that could sit natively on Snowflake, support white-labelled, customer-facing embedding with multi-tenant security (essential in a competitive industry where hotel data must remain isolated), and offer pixel-perfect customization so dashboards felt like a natural extension of Kalibri’s own products.

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What made Astrato stand out

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Kalibri evaluated four BI vendors, including enterprise-scale platforms. The pattern was consistent: some could embed but lacked native Snowflake connectivity. Others queried Snowflake but could not deliver the white-labelled, customer-facing experience Kalibri needed. Every alternative required some form of product duplication — a separate application, a parallel data pipeline, or both.

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Astrato’s decisive advantage was that it eliminated this trade-off entirely: Snowflake-native, multi-tenant embedding without product duplication. One platform that queried Kalibri’s Snowflake data live, embedded directly into their product as a fully white-labelled experience, and enforced tenant-level data isolation out of the box.

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What clinched the decision was how the Astrato team showed up during the evaluation. Rather than asking Kalibri to build a proof of concept, Astrato offered to build it for them — and delivered a working prototype in just 2 days that matched Graham’s vision precisely.

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“What sold me was when the Astrato team presented it back to us — it was exactly what was in my head. Here’s one of the problems, here’s how we solve it. Visually, it was exactly what our team needed. I think the reason it was easy comes back to the people and the partnership. From Martin to everyone else we were talking to — they were willing and able to do whatever we needed or to help us through the process.” – Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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A full migration in 10 days

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With a hard contract deadline on Looker and no room for extension, Kalibri faced a binary choice: renew for another year or migrate immediately. Astrato’s team made the second option viable.

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“Jonathan said, just send us some data and we’ll build it for you. Let’s paint the vision.” – Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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And they did. Over three weeks and around 10 days of effort, the Astrato team worked alongside Kalibri’s engineers to migrate the full reporting estate — consolidating 88 reports into 60 cleaner, more navigable Astrato dashboards built on top of datasets exceeding 100 billion rows. 

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The migration was not a lift-and-shift. In fact, it was an opportunity to rationalise the reporting estate and give users a better experience than what they had before.

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The timing was critical. Kalibri’s engineering team was already stretched across key projects that quarter. Astrato absorbed the migration workload, building dashboards directly so that Kalibri’s own team could stay focused on the products already in the market.

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“Within three weeks, the Astrato team came alongside ours and helped us migrate everything off of our existing BI tool and onto Astrato. They helped us build live dashboards.” – Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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What’s next: analytics as a growth lever

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Today, Kalibri uses Astrato internally — its sales team and data teams run dashboards daily. The next phase is customer-facing: fully branded, white-labelled dashboards embedded directly in Kalibri’s portal.

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When a client logs in — whether they are an individual hotel revenue manager or a multi-property owner overseeing a portfolio — they will see dashboards branded entirely as Kalibri, built around the hospitality KPIs they already track. Filters and drill-downs follow a consistent structure across customers, but each client sees only their own data. 

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Because Astrato queries Snowflake directly (across datasets exceeding 100 billion rows), the dashboards will always reflect the latest data with no lag and no manual refresh cycles.

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Astrato’s multi-tenant architecture makes this possible at scale — a non-negotiable in an industry where direct competitors rely on the same benchmarking platform. The result is a product experience that feels like Kalibri built it themselves, not a third-party bolt-on.

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“Our clients can now interact with that data on the spot. We boil the ocean, but we get it down to something they can understand, interact with, and grow from.” –Graham Harrell, Director of Product, Kalibri 

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The bigger picture

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The strategic implications extend well beyond better dashboards. By embedding analytics directly into its product, Kalibri has created a new dimension of customer value — one that deepens engagement, strengthens retention, and opens the door to product-led expansion.

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Customers who interact with live data daily are stickier than those who receive a static report once a month. The shift from periodic deliverables to always-on analytics transforms Kalibri’s relationship with its clients from transactional to embedded — making the platform harder to leave and easier to expand.

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For Kalibri, this also means product growth without proportional engineering growth. New dashboards and data products can be built on Astrato’s platform without diverting the core engineering team, allowing the company to expand its portfolio at a pace that would have been impossible with a custom-built solution.

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