Your focus should be on exploring your options and gathering all of the data – guest profiles, preferences, and all kinds of operational know-how – into a single unit. By Larry and Adam Mogelonsky – 12/10/2021
As made clear during the troubled times of the pandemic, the tech stack is the backbone of hotel operations, enabling lean teams to be productive and keep the property running while attentively serving guests. The problem is that current technology in the hotel industry has developed inharmoniously, creating data pockets that are not systematically integrated.
At the HITEC in Dallas towards the end of September, integration is indeed still a buzzword, as it has been at numerous trade fairs over the past ten years. On this year’s outing, great strides were taken to further consolidate various tasks and processes under one roof to enable smoother work orders, faster communication, better analysis and more team responsibility. There are indeed some very versatile PMS as well as outstanding operating platforms that sit on top of these base systems to handle a multitude of responsibilities and to bridge various isolated departments.
However, we would both argue that integrating and consolidating data into coherent systems is not fast enough compared to other industries, which ultimately comes at the expense of revenue generation.
As owner representatives of various hotels, we are still surprised at how many aspects of a property depend on Excel spreadsheets stored on a manager’s hard drive, often without cloud copies or digitized backups. Additionally, when it comes to integrations or API development, different platforms build and subtract selected data points as needed (or as programmed) instead of collecting everything to a single hub for other parts of the stack.
What we are suggesting here would fall into the area of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, where all guest-related information is mapped in a single database, but the more up-to-date and precise acronym would be a CDP or customer data platform. There is some overlap between these two terms, so for the sake of simplicity let’s just say that the latter pulls data from more sources (own or third party) and structures everything better for omnichannel redistribution.
Before this becomes a game of alphabet soup, it is important to understand the need for a centralized and “clean” or consistently tabular database with this trend. For now, your focus should be on exploring your options and gathering all of the data – guest profiles, preferences, and all kinds of operational know-how – into a single unit.
Eventually, there are plans to hire a data scientist to analyze this huge chunk of data and then apply some form of soft artificial intelligence to find workable patterns. This will likely involve an unsupervised learning algorithm that will review everything that has been collected without prior guidance on exactly what to look for, and then come back with some inference as to who your guests really are and how you are most effectively budgeting for the next year can build up.
But these AI tools are only as good as the data they are applied to. So the more information you have to work on, the better the end results. The danger pointed out in all of this is how the big players in the industry – like the OTAs and now Airbnb – collect their data and then use it to improve the online booking experience, feed referrals and drive more customer spend motivate.
The only way to survive the competition is to start collecting, cleaning, and consolidating. The tech stack should be constantly reviewed for this express purpose so that in due time you can derive patterns of behavior to guide future CAPEX, guest service initiatives or marketing campaigns. Competition will be fierce for the next decade and data-driven decision-making will inevitably lead to increased sales, reduced costs and the protection of your assets.
Larry and Adam Mogelonsky represent one of the world’s most published teams of hospitality writers with more than a decade of online material. As a partner in Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, a Toronto-based consulting firm, Larry focuses on asset management, sales and operations while Adam specializes in hotel technology and marketing. Her experience spans real estate around the world, both branded and independent properties, ranging from luxury and boutique to select service. Her work includes six books “Are You an Ostrich or a Llama?”. (2012), “Lamas Rule” (2013), “Hotel Llama” (2015), “The Lama is Inn” (2017), “The Hotel Mogel” (2018) and “More Hotel Mogel” (2020). You can reach Larry at larry@hotelmogel.com or Adam at adam@hotelmogel.com to discuss challenges in the hotel business or book lectures.
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