Hotel Performance Management
The last several years have seen smart technology become more and more pervasive across the board, and now with Covid-19, we’ve seen a faster adoption by businesses than ever before. The hospitality industry is no exception, and as people are itching to have experiences outside the home, hoteliers have the perfect opportunity to gain a competitive advantage and leverage a variety of smart technologies to reduce operational costs, improve the guest experience and uncover new sources of revenue.
While many smart technologies are interactive on the surface like contactless check-in, smart reserved parking via sensor data, or smart room service via occupancy sensors, the real value and opportunity lie in the data. Successful hoteliers will be the ones who invest in collecting and analyzing the right data in a comprehensive way to generate actionable insights.
Automate, Digitize, Centralize.
A key challenge of hotel data management is the high diversity of available information. It can be extracted from multiple websites, metasearch platforms, social media, internal documents, reports, and systems. If not properly managed, information is lost, incorrect, or unused. According to Gartner, poor data quality costs the average organization $15 million per year. Causing companies to potentially market to the wrong accounts and leads, operations can waste hours manually cleaning data, and decision-makers can make bad calls based on inaccurate information.
Do you have the right programs, systems, or tools in place to be able to quickly and accurately access and analyze your data from smart technologies?
Sherri Kimes, revenue management expert and professor emeritus at Cornell University reminds us that ‘hotels may not be looking into the right data points to measure revenues effectively, their backend systems may be unable to handle such large datasets, or their employees may not have the right training”. It’s common practice for hotels to use multiple disparate systems making it hard to effectively harness the power of data. Integrating all those systems for hotel management, distribution, revenue management, CRM & loyalty, marketing, and reputation management into an information management system (IMS). IMS Systems helps hoteliers effectively collect, aggregate, analyze, and visualize their own first-party data, and overlay it with industry trend data for actionable insights into guest behavior and future demand. Hoteliers who have a strong grasp on not only their hotel but also industry trend data will be best positioned to be proactive, better understand their market, adapt as necessary, push beneficial hotel-wide initiatives forward, and effectively get ahead of the curve.
Aggregating your hotel data and benchmarking your business against the market and industry trends, in addition, to your hotel portfolio analysis provides critical information on your business and guests. Jerrod Jackson, Vice President of Revenue Management for ZMC Hotels, champions the MAPP tool and shares that “as we do not currently employ an automated BI system that coalesces the on-the-books data for our 39 hotels. TheMAPP Report has helped tremendously by giving us […] automated insight. As we navigate the challenges of the current environment and do more with less, [the MAPP tool] helps us maximize the time available to our GMs and Revenue Team. It’s one less manual task to have to worry about”. Best-in-class hoteliers are using all-in-one business dashboards to have real-time insights on RevPAR, ADR, promotional rates, marketing, sales, support, infrastructure, and more, to navigate the new technology era and create revenue-generating strategies.
Digitizing, Centralizing, and automating data collection and analysis will increase efficiencies so you actually can “do more with less”.
Now accessible to all hoteliers, both big and small.
In the past, a scalable IMS typically came with a cost that was only affordable to bigger hotels and brands, but now the technology has reached a point where it is available to any size property. IMS Systems should work with clients of all sizes, from family owners/operators to the largest hotel management groups and brands in the world, and should care deeply about helping hoteliers navigate today’s uncharted landscape and make more strategic, well-informed, data-backed business decisions. An all-in-one IMS and back office automation solution helps hoteliers not only get actionable insights for long-term strategies but also for pivotal short-term ones.
A cost-effective cloud-based IMS allows you to automate aggregating data and provides centralized data insights to your organization, giving you the opportunity to comprehensively understand your data and act quickly on new opportunities. Acting on the right data will help optimize your business, improve customer interactions, and increase revenue.
The right smart technologies help ensure hoteliers have significant big data, but all that data is meaningless if you don’t have the right data when you need it. Accurate and insightful data is the foundation of any good plan. A cloud-based IMS helps hoteliers achieve this solid foundation, and brings clear visibility and instant insights to your hotel portfolio in an easy and cost-effective solution.
Best-in-class hoteliers use real-time insights provided by an IMS to solve, improve, and optimize some of the following important initiatives:
- Identifying and targeting the most profitable guests
- Occupancy forecasting accuracy
- Best distribution channels
- Dynamic room pricing
- Streamlining procurement, housekeeping, or maintenance operations
- Increasing guest loyalty
- Online reputation management
