Choosing the Best Data Visualization Tool for 2025

Scaling New Heights: How a Rock Climbing Guide Agency Transformed with InetSoft's StyleBI

Nestled in the heart of Colorado's rugged Front Range, HighPoint Adventures was more than just a rock climbing guide agency—it was a community hub for thrill-seekers, weekend warriors, and aspiring mountaineers. Founded by two former pro climbers, Ava and Miles, HighPoint had grown steadily since its inception in 2012. What began as a passion project—just two guides and a handful of routes—evolved into a thriving business with over 30 staff members, three regional offices, hundreds of climbing packages, and a loyal customer base across the country.

But growth came with its own set of challenges.

By 2023, HighPoint was facing data chaos. Booking systems, route logs, guide schedules, customer feedback, incident reports, weather patterns, and marketing metrics were all siloed in different systems. The leadership team knew they were sitting on a goldmine of information, but it was scattered, inconsistent, and hard to act on. Reports were built manually—usually by cobbling together CSVs, spreadsheets, and rough visualizations in Google Data Studio.

Miles put it bluntly: "We were climbing in the dark."

That's when Ava stumbled upon InetSoft's StyleBI, an open-source, embeddable BI tool that promised data mashups, real-time dashboards, and a light footprint. It seemed too good to be true—but they decided to take a chance.

The First Ascent: Implementation

HighPoint's tech lead, a savvy ex-climber named Jordan, led the implementation. The open-source nature of StyleBI allowed for deep customization. Jordan appreciated that the tool wasn't a bloated enterprise platform but rather a flexible framework that could be tailored to their unique needs.

He began by connecting their primary data sources:

• The online booking system (via API),
• Their internal CRM (a self-hosted PostgreSQL instance),
• A third-party weather service,
• Google Sheets used by guides for field reports, and
• Social media campaign data exported from Meta and Google.

StyleBI's data mashup layer quickly proved to be a game-changer. Jordan created a unified data model that finally brought together disparate datasets: bookings linked to customer profiles, correlated with guide availability and weather patterns. The real-time transformation layer meant they could cleanse and harmonize inconsistent data without duplicating everything into a warehouse.

Route to Insight: New Dashboards

Within three weeks, Jordan had built the agency's first operational dashboard.

It showed bookings by region, broken down by guide, difficulty level, and weather forecasts. One insight jumped out immediately: a significant drop-off in intermediate bookings during monsoon season, even in areas where indoor climbing packages were available.

Ava and the marketing team pounced on the opportunity. They created a "Monsoon Pass" campaign promoting discounted indoor climbs and multi-session training packages. Within a month, revenue in the affected regions was up 14%.

But that was just the beginning.

Using StyleBI's embedded dashboards, they built a guide-facing portal. Now, guides could log in and see their schedules, route popularity trends, customer feedback, and safety incident stats—all in one place. It empowered them to proactively suggest safer or more popular routes and gave them a greater sense of ownership in the company's growth.

One guide, Luis, started tweaking his recommended routes after spotting patterns in customer reviews. His net promoter score shot up, and he quickly became one of the agency's top performers.

Harnessing the Summit: Strategy and Planning

With better operational visibility came sharper strategic planning.

The leadership team began using StyleBI for scenario analysis. They built visualizations to explore "what-if" cases—what would happen to bookings if they shifted guide coverage? How would demand shift if they offered beginner routes in higher-altitude areas?

One particularly eye-opening analysis showed that weekend bookings were saturating faster than expected, while weekday utilization lagged. The solution: a flexible pricing model that offered discounts for weekday climbs. They modeled multiple price tiers in StyleBI and simulated the impact on revenue and guide capacity before rolling out changes.

The result? A 21% uptick in weekday bookings with no drop in total revenue.

More impressively, Jordan used the Style Studio module to prototype a custom visual application that showed a geographic overlay of climbing incidents, overlaid with terrain data, weather history, and guide certifications. This not only improved risk management but also formed the basis of a new annual safety review process.

Customer Connection and Community Building

On the customer side, the transformation was equally profound.

HighPoint began to experiment with client-facing analytics. Through their portal, climbers could track their own stats—routes climbed, elevation gains, difficulty ratings, even personal bests over time. It turned out to be a hit. Casual climbers loved the gamification aspect, and hardcore enthusiasts appreciated the ability to monitor progress.

This personalized experience became a core part of HighPoint's brand.

They also began running satisfaction analysis. By tying feedback forms to booking data, they could isolate which route-guide combinations produced the best experiences. They started promoting those pairings more prominently. This helped new customers make better choices and drove repeat bookings up by 18% over six months.

The Cultural Shift

The real power of StyleBI wasn't just in the technology—it was in how it changed the culture at HighPoint.

Data became a daily conversation. Guides compared performance metrics not out of competition, but out of curiosity and shared pride. Managers used dashboards in weekly check-ins. Marketing teams used A/B test dashboards to optimize campaigns in near real-time. Finance had a clearer picture of cash flow, seasonality, and promotional ROI.

Ava described it as a "mindset shift from reactive to proactive."

And because the solution was open-source, Jordan and the tech team could continuously evolve it—adding new data sources, building custom components, and keeping it nimble without vendor lock-in.

Looking Forward: StyleBI as a Strategic Partner

Two years in, HighPoint's relationship with StyleBI has deepened. They've contributed plugins back to the community and even shared their story at an open-source summit. What began as a tool to clean up chaos turned into the foundation of a smarter, more resilient, more customer-centric business.

StyleBI helped them see the terrain ahead more clearly—and climb higher than they thought possible.

As Miles now puts it, "In climbing and business, knowing where to place your next hold makes all the difference. StyleBI gave us that map."