Tips to become a data-driven hotelier
Like other sectors, data plays a significant role in today’s modern hospitality industry. When interpreted with perfection and analyzed efficiently, data helps hotel decision-makers make business-critical decisions based on facts, trends, and numbers. It empowers them to understand their guests’ preferences, inventory distribution patterns, future demand, and many more aspects of their business. This copy will look at the role of data and its importance in the hotel business.
Getting hold of data
The whole game starts with this. You need to have a massive amount of data related to your hotel’s sales, guests, revenue, etc. Manually locating and gathering such data could be challenging, and those challenges could multiply when you have a hotel chain to manage. This is where technology comes to your rescue. Yes, you got it. We are referring to Hotel PMS, to be very precise, the cloud-based ones.
A powerful cloud-based Hotel PMS can generate data from across departments in your hotel for all your member properties. In hotel industry parlance, you call it group-wide reports. For example, let’s look at the manager flash report. This report will let you know your revenue from all the centers, including room, FnB, spa, gift shops, and other operating departments. Plus, you will also get to know about rooms occupied, ARR, and other essential metrics on a daily basis. The best part is that you can filter the data to locate trends at a particular property level or group level.
When you are empowered with the data mentioned above points around the performance of your revenue centers, it becomes easier for you to discuss and determine the next step. You can collaborate with the respective department heads to make strategic decisions to overcome any hurdles, if any.
Understanding guests with data
Another interesting way to leverage data to the benefit of your hotel chain is to have access to the centralized guest history through the hotel management system. Here, too, with a multi-property solution like Hotelogix, you can view past/existing guest data at both property level and group level. For example, Mr. Smith has already stayed at your Property A last year. Now, he wants to stay at your Property B. The moment the guest tries to talk to your central call center about the availability, you can look up his past data in the hotel PMS and have a clear idea about his preferences. Let’s say during his last year’s visit at Property A, he requested a pool-facing room with a minibar. Keeping this in mind, you can make an appropriate recommendation this time for Property B. Not only that, but it will also allow you to know his food and beverage preferences so that you can customize and create the same experience this time too. This is how guest data empowers you to know them and serve them better.
Managing revenue with data
This is another crucial area of the hotel business where data plays a critical role. Here, the integration between two cloud solutions – Hotel PMS and revenue management system helps you with the right set of data at the right time to sell the right room at the right price to the right guest. It considers the complete booking information, your availability, local demand and supply, competitor pricing, and many other factors to help you configure the right price for your rooms. In this context, we can talk about occupancy-based dynamic pricing. For example – an intelligent cloud hotel software like Hotelogix keeps an eye on your occupancy levels and demand and suggests changes in your room rates so that you get to see more RevPAR.
Handling room distribution with data
Inventory distribution across online channels, including OTAs, metasearch engines, brand websites, and GDSs, is challenging to accomplish. The slightest mistake can lead to an enormous amount of financial loss. However, the right set of system-generated data like what we get from a hotel PMS and channel manager can make things easier for you. You can look at the data, estimate the demand to change room rates in real-time. Moreover, it empowers you to know the best performing sales channels – channels that fetch more guests so that you can allocate more rooms to them. The crux here is – data enables you to optimize your online distribution efforts with the best-selling channels.
The hospitality industry in general and the hotel industry, in particular, has a lot to gain from data. When you become data-proficient, there is no room for you to do guesswork, which can hamper your growth. Data can tell you what is working for you and what is not. It empowers you to acquire new guests, target new markets, retain existing guests’ loyalty, improve occupancy and revenue, predict trends, and manage marketing efforts for your hotel business to gain a competitive edge.