With changing time and increased competition, many hotels now have started using hotel industry business insights to take relevant business decisions, ultimately to increase hotel revenue. However, are you one of those smart hoteliers who understands the importance of big data analytics when it comes to run your hotel business efficiently?
Here are some important tips to increase hotel revenue by analysing hospitality big data as part of your hotel revenue management effort.
1. Look at your guest data
Nothing works better than impeccable guest service and top-notch guest relationship in guest-facing hotel industry. If your guests are happy about your property and its service, they will make your business grow. They become your brand ambassadors and loyal customers, thus giving you repeat business. But, is it so easy? Will you be able to serve them without knowing them? Will you be able to personalize their experience without understanding their likes and dislikes?
The answer is a big ‘No!’.
But then what is the solution? Well, it is your guest data.
Look at the pile of guest data you have, it will definitely help you understand them. Once you know their expectations and preferences like choice of room, favourite cuisine, buying powers, etc. you will be in a better position to make their next stay a ‘special’ one. Enhanced guest service can also help you sell more non-room items as happy guests tend to spend more.
This apart, use the same guest data to pitch your brand through targeted mails. For example – after some deep-diving into your guest data you realise that certain guests of yours attended an annual festival/event in your area last year. During this time they stayed at your property in September. This presents a great opportunity for you to get back in touch with them via mails, in July, reminding about the upcoming event. Let them know that they can avail a 20% discount on room booking if they book with you before 1st week of August. You must run timely promotions with personalized packages to attract more guests. Chances of getting more bookings are higher with such activities, and more booking translates into increased revenues.
2. Know your occupancy forecast
It is highly essential to come up with the accurate occupancy forecast for your hotel. And to achieve this important factor, you have to rely on data, data and only data. You must analyse a set of critical data coming from search engine queries, hotel website traffic, OTA booking, corporate booking, reservations generated via walk-ins, phone calls and mails, etc along with the seasonality to reach the occupancy forecast.
This process will help you understand number of expected arrivals from all the sources, no shows, cancellations, overstays and under-stays, etc. And when, you are armed with such valuable insights, don’t you think that you will be able to address negative issues like cancellations and no shows, etc. better? It would also help you to find out if a particular room type will be in more demand during the projected forecast time.
To be precise, you can leverage data to produce accurate occupancy forecast that leads to improved sales and revenue.
3. Keep an eye on your expense data
This aspect is quite important when you plan to increase your hotel revenue. Unnecessary expenses that are not giving you the desired returns must be avoided. Here too, data plays a significant role. Take a close look at your all running operating costs, see if some of them can be dropped, but not at the cost of guest experience.
For example – energy bill constitutes a huge percentage of the entire operating budget of a hotel. Use data to understand the average time guests are spending outside of the room or of your property while the HVAC is still running. Now, you need to act on this immediately if there is significant amount of power wastage. Try to find out the impact of power bill on RevPAR. This will enable you to save more on power bill which will ultimately result in enhanced profitability.
In short, leveraging hotel business data can help you to come up with an effective expense management plan to avoid revenue pilferage and leakage.
So, yes, data can really give an immense advantage to your hotel business. You need to take care of one thing in this process – ensure that such data needs to be accessed by the right set of people, at the right time, to come up with the right strategy. But, you have to adopt a smart cloud PMS that comes integrated with a business intelligence solution to have the right set of hospitality big data at your disposal.
