Data is the most valuable item in the world. Companies around the world use massive amounts of data to gain visibility into their market, customers, and operations. Ultimately, big data is the key to driving profit in today’s market, regardless of your industry.
In the hospitality industry, making profitable decisions can be challenging, but leveraging big data can help point you in the right direction. Big data can be the difference between creating an efficient, revenue-maximising operation and getting squeezed out of your market by competitors. But, what is big data? And how can your hotel use it to boost revenue and profitability quarter after quarter?
What is big data in the hotel industry?
Simply put, big data is large and complex data sets collected every day by businesses. Big data often requires advanced processing software to visualise and identify trends. In the hotel industry, big data often comes in three forms.
First, market indices, such as the market penetration index (MPI), used to measure your hotel’s occupancy performance, and the average rate index (ARI), used to measure your hotel’s ADR performance, both compared to an aggregated grouping of hotels.
Second, guest data collected from your property management system (PMS) and POS software is used to gain visibility into who your guests are and what drives their behaviour. Finally, online travel agencies (OTA) capture valuable data on your hotel’s channel performance and guest review scores.
The 5 Vs of big data
There are 5 attributes of big data that help ensure the decisions you make are actually helping improve your hotel’s profitability. Each one plays an important role in making sure that you’re working with quality data.
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Volume
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The amount of data your hotel can access is key to gaining insight. The more data you have, the more visibility you have into your hotel’s market, operations, and guests.
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Velocity
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Big data means fast data. By maximising the frequency of your data collection and the speed at which you can clean, organise, and analyise data, you can gain real-time insights into your hotel.
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Variety
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There’s a wide variety of data that stems from modern-day technology in the hospitality industry. You must be able to access all the necessary metrics to gain the right insights and make profitable decisions.
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Value
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This refers to the value that big data can provide, and it relates directly to what you can do with that collected data. Being able to pull value from big data is all about building standardised reports and analysis processes that help you make the right decisions based on its insights.
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Veracity
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What’s the value of big data if you can't trust it? Ensuring that your data is accurate is essential to making precise decisions and keeping your hotel as profitable as possible.
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How do hotels use big data?
You can use big data to reduce costs and improve performance in virtually every department of your hotel. From operations to F&B and finance, if you effectively collect and analyse large amounts of data, you can leverage your insights to reduce operational redundancies and maximise profit.
In the modern hospitality industry, there are three standard uses of big data:
Let’s go over each one in more detail.
Revenue management
The most common use of big data in the hospitality industry is in revenue management. As revenue managers segment guests, set room rates, and manage channels, data is a key component of their day-to-day.
In revenue management, market indices provide invaluable insights into the occupancy, ADR, and RevPAR of competing hotels. By tracking market indices over time, you can benchmark the performance of your hotel against the competition and identify key trends in the market. With a clear view of how their property is performing in the market, revenue managers can leverage big data to accurately anticipate levels of demand for rooms and make strategic decisions to maximise revenue.
Marketing
Big data enables hotel marketers to gain a better understanding of who their target market is and how to develop messaging that appeals to them. At the strategic level, marketers can use big data to budget the optimal spend across channels in order to maximise ROI. Data collected from hotel data systems, channel and campaign performance metrics, and public census gives marketers unique insight into what drives engagement from specific guest segments.
For example, if you find that one guest segment frequently engages with your email marketing campaigns, you can craft your email messaging to appeal to that segment. By using big data to determine the specific characteristics of each of your guest segments, you can identify their content, channel, and format preferences and optimise your marketing efforts to drive bookings.
Guest Experience
Modern hotel guests arrive with high expectations, and they want personalised experiences. Their loyalty to a hotel can only be won by providing such service consistently. Extensive guest profiles are built from data collected from your PMS and POS systems. You can use this information on their identities, stay history, and past behaviour to tailor their stay experience to their preferences and, in turn, drive loyalty.
Hotels can also measure their guest experience performance by accessing OTA review and reputation data. These insights enable hotel managers to identify their hotel’s strengths and weaknesses through the eyes of their guests. Looking at how their hotel is rated, managers can shape, test, and recalibrate their efforts to improve guest experience.
Data analytics tools for hotels
Big data is only valuable if you can use it to gain actionable insights and make strategic decisions. To do that, there are a couple of tools you can use. Let’s check out each one and see how they work.
Hotel business intelligence
A hotel business intelligence (BI) platform consolidates market data and data from your siloed systems, such as your PMS, POS, and sales & catering (S&C) software into a single interface. With all of your data centralised, hotel BI software allows you to easily visualise metrics and automate reports. This tool is essential to leveraging big data to improve revenue management and guest experience.
Customer relationship management software
If you’re looking to tap into the power of big data for your marketing department, a hotel customer relationship management software (CRM) is the tool you need. Hotel CRMs allow you to segment your guests, target your audience, and monitor the success of campaigns from one touchpoint. With the insight that a CRM provides, maximsing the ROI of your spend and efforts is much easier.
How to bring big data analytics into your hotel
To leverage big data effectively, the technology you use is essential to ensure you have accurate information and make fact-based decisions. Hotel Business Intelligence Software(BI) provides insights into customer purchasing behaviour and enable you to predict their reaction to future revenue initiatives on a single platform.
Access to structured data and intuitive visualisation will excel your team’s performance, your hotel’s profits and reputation – the main drivers of a win-win strategic process for any hotel.
InTouch BI provides a single, easy-to-use platform that will help your entire team to utilise big data.
Request a product tour today to experience the next frontier of big data analysis and forecasting to position your hotel for success.
