Hospitality innovation unleashed: Leveraging hotel data to uncover new business opportunities

Learn how to start making data-driven, progressive decisions for your hotel

Legacy technology is a double-edged sword. Your current systems may still function adequately, but they could also be holding you back.

Due to the complex nature of hotel operations, it’s easy for hoteliers to rely on outdated processes. Even a weekend’s worth of administration mistakes can be enough to damage a hotel’s reputation, and guests lack sympathy for teething issues with a new system when it starts to affect the quality of their stay. As such, hospitality businesses can easily become stuck in the habit of relying on legacy technology.

As the industry grows and becomes increasingly competitive, merely getting by with an outdated system or process is no longer enough to keep a hotel or resort ahead of the market. It’s time for hoteliers to embrace digitalisation, and decision makers recognise this, with 61% of hospitality companies stating that their priority is adopting new technologies to better serve customers and suppliers.

But where should you start? The first step is understanding how you can utilise the information you already have to drive innovation and start making data-driven, progressive decisions. Here are just a few of the ways that your hotel’s data can be used to create value across your portfolio.

Streamline processes by enabling collaboration

Every hospitality business can benefit from streamlining their processes. In the past, developing efficiency might have involved hiring more staff, embarking on lengthy and expensive training programmes, or setting higher standards for your teams to work towards. These days, the solution is much easier.

By plugging your data into a hotel management solution, you can centralise the running of all key operations, from bookings and housekeeping to finances and IT. Every team across your portfolio will be able to access the information they need at a glance, while gaining helpful real-time suggestions on what to do when for the best results. For example, booking data shows that the hotel is relatively quiet for the week ahead, so the solution can automatically notify the marketing team to push a new promotion forward, thus boosting profit.

It also encourages collaboration between departments, and builds better awareness of the holistic nature of hotel operations – for example, the staff at the bar are able to see when the venue’s conference hall is booked out for a big event, enabling them to better prepare for high demand. Overall, your entire body of staff will be empowered to make smarter, faster decisions, with the confidence of knowing every choice is supported by high statistical likelihood of success.

Take advantage of advances in AI

It seems like every business is eager to implement Artificial Intelligence into business processes and operations due to the time-saving and optimisation benefits it provides. Doing so is easier than you might first think – in fact, many cloud-based solutions integrate AI functionality into their tools so seamlessly that you might not have even noticed.

The best hotel management solutions use AI to automate previously manual admin tasks, giving your teams more space to focus on tasks that add value instead. They use your hotel’s data to predict how different scenarios will play out based on current resources, giving you the opportunity to course-correct for a better outcome or set tasks to complete in the background.

These solutions can be used for anything from adjusting prices to match market fluctuations, to adding personalised touches to an individual guest’s hotel room based on their existing customer profile data. All from easy-to-use interfaces designed with accessibility in mind, enabling everyone on your team to embed the benefits of AI into the daily operations of your hotel, no matter how tech-savvy they are.

From there, the value of your data increases as the solutions build up a bank of information regarding what works best for your hotel, enabling your teams to make progressively better decisions over time.

Create an environment of constant improvement

Hoteliers have a broad idea of how their venues are performing based on feedback and industry rankings and awards. But these tend to be longer-term reflections of performance, and it can be difficult to look back and understand what specific factors contributed to those results.

In contrast, hotel management software can provide real-time feedback on your performance. By collecting and analysing data around how your hotel is running, these solutions provide you with the most up-to-date and relevant assessment of how guests feel and how staff are working. The system can then draw correlations between different causatory elements and prompt you with suggestions on how to fix it – for example, perhaps guest satisfaction overall declines when the purchase of day-passes to your spa facilities rises, leading you to tweak the level of day-passes available at any one time.

The reasons behind fluctuations in hotel performance may otherwise slip by unnoticed, but new solutions serve to unlock this knowledge. You can then use longer-term data to fuel the direction of ongoing training, ensuring that teams truly understand what works and what doesn’t for your unique guests.

It’s time to start leveraging your data

It’s commendable that hotels and resorts have survived the turbulent events of the last few years, but it’s time to look forward and explore how to continue your successes for years to come. As the industry grows more competitive, it’s those who embrace innovative new advances in hotel management technology who stand to reap the rewards of the future and discover the benefits of being able to make progressive data-driven decisions at scale.

You’re not alone if you feel that legacy systems are holding your hotel back from performance gains, but it’s time for IT leaders to take control of their data and put it to work, with a helping hand from the right solutions.

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