Case Study: Virgin Australia achieves data-driven decision-making and faster reporting with Alation

Airline Embarks on a Journey to Become Data-Driven

Virgin Australia, a Brisbane-based airline operating a 94-aircraft Virgin-branded fleet and recently simplified to an all-Boeing 737 structure, faced growing IT fragmentation as business units built systems independently. That created siloed data, inconsistent definitions and conflicting reports that hampered executive decision‑making and made data quality and lineage difficult to trace.

The Data Platforms team chose Alation to provide a business-oriented data catalogue, dictionary and lineage tools and used it to build the airline’s first data governance framework with standards, policies and glossaries. The implementation has enabled faster data discovery and reporting, improved data literacy and consistent definitions, clearer lineage for quality investigations, reduced duplicated effort, and better readiness for a planned migration to Databricks on AWS.

Virgin Australia