Business Data, PMS, and Connecting with the Modern Hotel Guest

It is a given now that business data is the lifeblood of any industry, which is no less true for hotels and resorts. Vital to the hospitality industry is the idea of an ongoing relationship with guests to extend the lifetime value of guests to the organisation. An advanced hotel property management solution helps to tie operations together to ensure efficiency. Hotel PMS is also in place to create that superior guest experience to encourage that value.

To do that efficiently, organisations have to know who their guests really are. Further, they have to have some idea of the journey that guests take when they engage with a location, and what their common behaviors are once they’re on that journey. From there, hotels and resorts get a clearer picture of who the ideal guest really is, and what they expect of a great guest experience. Where does a robust and scalable platform for clearer insights on business data play into this? Let’s take a look.

Tracking the guest journey to find out who they really are

The ideal state for leading hotels is a clear sense of continuity for the guest. Historically speaking and behind the scenes using legacy technology, this has involved making connections between sometimes disparate systems to manage stages in the guest journey in very fragmented ways. Within that, the picture of who the guest really is also tends to be fragmented. Therefore, the way organisations serve those guests tended to follow suit, resulting in a less than ideal guest experience, or at least one that didn’t realise the full potential on what it might have been. This is because in the end, the business is unable to find out who those guests really are – what their histories with the organisation have been, what their activities while on the properties were, and what kinds of activities, services, amenities were of most interest to them.

With modern hotel PMS deployed in the cloud and that connects with systems across multiple locations, organisations are better positioned to find out more about their guests and make that information accessible in all locations. Perhaps most importantly, advanced hospitality technology solutions help them to better determine who their ideal guests are, to help them improve communications, craft more targeted selling strategies, and create incentives via personalisation and a greater sense of seamlessness for the guest.

Matching activities and preferences with personalised services

A big part of that seamlessness and greater continuity between one part of a property and another is matching guest activities while in a property with the kinds of services that are offered to them in response. A systemic platform to manage this kind of data in detail is essential to making the guest feel like their experiences and hotel PMS plays a vital role in making sure that happens.

Leading hotel organisations have invested in a centralised platform that brings all of those components into a common ecosystem for their business data across all major systems. Using their data, they’re able to find out who they’re ideal guest is, and how to make sure that the services they render are in line with those vital factors. This is the best way to produce the superior guest experience that keeps these high-value guests coming back for the long term. This is the way that hotels will stay resilient, using their data to continue to develop relationships with these guests even during periods of downturn.

Establishing a platform for success

A big takeaway to this discussion is all about unity and creating a single source of truth across all locations, brands, and sub-brands, wherever applicable. Whatever the structure of the business, it’s this centralised, digitalised, and integrated environment where industry leaders are gathering business intelligence, competitive traction, and long-term resilience.

In our current era, staying resilient to meet the challenges of the coming decade is on the agenda of many in the hospitality industry. To address some of the larger issues, we’ve created an extensive resource to address the areas that will help hotels and resorts to do just that in these uncertain times and as we journey into the 2020s.