The more technology hotels use, the more data becomes available to them. For hotel property owners and sales managers, these metrics are so valuable. When you learn to organize, analyze, and apply the right hotel data, you can:
Create a better experience for guests
Book more rooms and group events
Outsmart your competition
Grow your bottom line
While the hospitality industry can apply data in many ways, these four are among the most discussed applications.
Big data is a way to identify what these hotels do best and market those strengths more powerfully.
4 hotel data strategies to grow your business and delight guests
1. Identify strengths and weaknesses
Consider the number of hotel reviews on Expedia, Travelocity, Facebook pages, Twitter, and more. Hotels exist in an industry where customers are more than happy to share their experience in detail.
Although these reviews may seem “qualitative,” you can pull numbers out of them. How many are positive? What words or phrases are used most often?
Organizing these hotel analytics so they can be analyzed gives you an enormous opportunity. You can identify the things your customers love most about your hotel and capitalize on them in your marketing. For example, if you find out that most guests come to you because of your location (versus your amenities, price or something else), you can highlight the area on your website.
Negative reviews are useful as well. Find out where you missed the mark and commit to improving. On the flip side, you can look at competitors’ negative reviews and highlight where you outshine them.
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2. Improve occupancy rates
Efficiency is the name of the game for most hotels. You need to fill rooms at the right price. Analyzing your occupancy data can help you do this.
The first step is to predict demand and pricing accordingly. For example, if a huge event is coming to your city, you can increase your rates a little to get the most ROI. More importantly, you can look at the occupancy rates from previous years to identify which dates, days of the week or seasons are most in demand.
On the other side of the coin, when demand is lower, you can price your rooms competitively. Review when you have the fewest guests, then lower your rates just enough to attract new customers at that time.
This isn’t anything new — but today, most hotels do this manually. As you aggregate more data, you can make more accurate predictions and eventually automate the task.
3. Understand your customers’ needs
Hotels are all about making people feel like they’re at home. At home, you know where the towels are, you have control over the A/C, and you know where to grab a bite to eat. Hotels profit from understanding exactly what customers want and meeting those needs promptly.
So how can hotel data help you do this? Your systems hold so much information! For example:
What time guests check in and out
How often guests are in their rooms
What restaurants guests ask them to book
Where guests are traveling from
How much they spend on extras like room service or spa treatments
When you know the most common preferences of your target market, you can create specialized offers just for them. They have to create their specialized offers strategically.
And depending on the size of your hotel, you can even segment customers into different profiles. That is, business travels likely have different habits than families on vacation. If you have data on both, you can target both of them effectively: you can tell families about the hotel’s daycare service, while touting the free Wi-Fi to professionals.
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4. Reach the right audience with time- and location-based marketing
Using data from past hotel marketing campaigns, marketing teams can promote the hotel to guests, wherever they are, exactly when they need a place to stay.
One great example: If your hotel is near the airport, you can create a mobile market campaign targeted at travelers who are looking for a place to stay after a flight cancellation.
What kind of hotel data would you need for this kind of campaign? Well, it’s actually data outside your own walls:
Flight cancellation data
Weather conditions
Areas most affected by inclement weather/flight cancellations
Hotel data is a powerful tool in the hospitality industry. So tell us: how has big data given your hotel an advantage? Join us on Facebook or LinkedIn to let us know.
