Turning hotel data into revenue: How smarter insights drive guest experience and profit
With the power to enable better business outcomes, hotel data underpins decision making across the hotel sector.
Content supplied by iDeaS for AccomNews readers.
Accurate data allows hoteliers to analyse booking patterns, effectively forecast demand and adjust their pricing, leading to increased RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room.) Additionally, by tracking on-site behaviour, hotels can identify areas where guests may experience issues and adjust to improve the overall guest experience.
Data can also be used to optimise operations and improve efficiency. Analysing data on room occupancy and staffing levels enables hotels to adjust their staffing schedules, ensuring they always have the right number of staff on hand to maximise the guest experience while keeping labour costs at efficient and profit-oriented levels.
However, it’s important for hoteliers to understand that not all data is created equal and that only relevant information should guide business decisions. Understanding which data to use in various situations is crucial for optimising operations, enhancing guest experiences and boosting property revenues.
But how can you identify which data is relevant in different situations and how can automation help surface insights to support better decisions?
Booking (and related forecasting) hotel data
Crucial for future planning, this data allows you to project room demand. It is also an essential input for pricing strategies, marketing campaigns, and revenue optimisation. Additionally, booking data aids in forecasting future income and expenditures, facilitating accurate budgeting. With a clear view of expected revenue and expenses, you can make informed decisions about capital investments, renovations and other financial commitments.
Long-term forecasting is vital for strategic planning for any hotel, playing a critical role for owners and investors. This data helps hotel chains make decisions about new locations, expansions, or market contractions. It also supports the assessment of entering new markets or investing in new property types.
To create accurate forecasts, you must rely on various data sources, including a property’s booking history, inventory history, future reservations, future inventory, and other pertinent data.
Additionally, you should incorporate macro-level intelligence such as economic, search and market demand data to help determine how they impact market trends and travel intentions.
Customer hotel data
Customer data comprises of information collected from guests through various touchpoints like booking channels, on-site interactions, feedback forms and social media. By analysing this data, you can identify patterns in customer behaviour, guest preferences and satisfaction levels, all of which can enable you to personalise or improve services to help enhance guest stays. For instance, if there are frequent complaints about slow wifi, you can use this feedback to justify investing in upgraded network infrastructure to improve guest satisfaction and increase the likeliness of repeat business.
Beyond guest perception data, it’s necessary to have an accurate understanding of each customer’s true value, which extends beyond room-rate expenditure. To grasp the full value of a guest, it is essential to consider their lifetime contributions, integrating data from all transaction systems. This ideal, holistic view should encompass everything from food services and day spa usage to purchases in guest rooms and gift shops, as well as the costs associated with different booking channels. Recognising your most valuable guests allows you to implement targeted strategies that make these individuals feel appreciated and recognised, fostering long-term loyalty. Examples of this include providing VIP check-in counters for loyalty members, coupled with free wifi for return guests and other tailored incentives, all of which enhance the guests sense of being valued and encourage repeat visits.
Operational hotel data
Operational data encompasses information on daily hotel operations such as room availability, occupancy rates, staff allocations, and revenue per available room (RevPAR). Such data is crucial for managing day-to-day operations and formulating short-term strategies.
By analysing data on room occupancy and staffing levels, you can make smarter decisions regarding staffing schedules, ensuring an appropriate number of staff are available to meet guest needs. Overstaffing leads to unnecessary expenses, while understaffing can result in guest dissatisfaction due to long wait times. By effectively integrating operational and forecast data, you can balance enhancing guest experiences with maintaining labour costs at efficient and profit-oriented levels, managing hotel operations in a much more sustainable way.
The need for automation and revenue management technology
Data is constantly churning with changing market conditions, leading to the continuous generation of new information. If a revenue manager were reliant on manual methods for analysing this information, it is almost certain that the data points will have changed by the time the analysis is complete.
For revenue management teams, the reality is that the sheer volume of data points to analyse and action can be overwhelming. The multitude of decisions required for optimal revenue performance is too complex for any individual to handle well without the assistance of automated solutions.
Advanced hotel revenue management systems (RMS) leverage data mining, machine learning, applied AI and predictive algorithms to calculate optimal pricing and inventory control strategies for hotels. These systems enable you to move beyond traditional revenue management processes. They work by fully harnessing data and forecasting capabilities, breaking down the data silos that currently exist in many hotels. This allows you to explore, predict and optimise total revenue performance.
Today’s RMS technology allows you to identify granular patterns and trends at a micro-level. By determining why specific results occur and predicting whether they will persist, hotel revenue managers can effectively optimise revenue opportunities both now and in the future.