Whether you’re in charge of five properties or 500, when you know how to action your hotel data insights, you can match the agility of any of your competitors. Getting your data together should be a two-pronged approach:
- Utilizing the proper data mining tools and platforms to aggregate and highlight your relevant hotel data
- Not overthinking it
At its core, hotel management is a people business. As Del Ross, Chief Revenue Officer at Hotel Effectiveness puts it, “I don’t know a single hotel person who got into the business because they want to sit behind a computer screen looking at spreadsheets. We are a business of people who like people.”
The quicker you get your hotel data in order, the easier it will be for you to focus that data into what matters most: delighting your guests.
Start by protecting – not growing – hotel profits
Audit! Before you start looking around for the hottest trends in the hospitality industry and spying on what your competitors are doing, audit your properties. If you want to increase your profits, the lowest hanging fruit you can pick is simply grabbing up the money you are throwing away each day through inefficient practices.
At Hotel Effectiveness, Del Ross’ organization has a proprietary training program to help hotels reduce labor waste. He states, “Simply by eliminating the waste, despite the labor cost or wage rates, I have learned that most hotels can save 5 to 15% of labor expenses.”
How can your hotels operate more effectively to 1) reduce overlap during predictably slower operating hours and 2) train your staff to empower them to do their work with more confidence and efficiency? With the right bird’s eye hotel data analytics tools, you can identify these excess labor costs and improve your overall operations.
Energy consumption is another factor that quickly eats into your profits. From HVAC units to leaky faucets and smart technology to re-capturing technology, investing in new energy efficient tech will almost always pay for itself long before it needs replacing.
What else is your current hotel data telling you that you can address today? Get these standards set in place before you start to get more creative with your data analytics.
Utilize real-time hotel data reporting to give yourself agility
As an operator or property manager, you have enough on your plate with day-to-day logistics alone. If you juggle staffing, budgets, improvement, maintenance, hotel data analysis, team management, surprises and more, you have to maximize your time.
When it comes to hotel data analysis, you don’t have time (or money) to spend on analytics tools that fall short. If you don’t have all of your key hotel data points in one location or access your data in real-time, you need to consider upgrading your systems.
Finding software options that are able to aggregate all of your various hotel data points into one user-friendly platform can save you valuable hours each week. Rather than pulling through dozens of interfaces, each with different credentials, layouts and export types, you and your team will only need one reporting platform. This allows you to spend more time focusing on actioning the hotel data that truly impacts the guest experience.
Bonus: If you can find software options that offer a visual component to data analysis it can make identifying trends that much simpler. Pull yourself and/or your team out of the black-hole of hotel data analysis with these kinds of visual and user-friendly platforms.
If you manage multiple properties, consider cloud-based analytics that your team can access anytime, anywhere. Creating a shared space empowers large teams to share and access information instantly. This gets your entire organization on the same page and reduces the expense of excessive printing and shipping of reports, and SOPs.
Trust what you know, and back it with data
When it comes to analyzing the immense amount of hotel portfolio data you have, don’t overthink it. Chris Green, Chief Commercial Officer at Chesapeake Hospitality, says, “We know what we have to do well, and we do it exceptionally well.” You have more user data at your fingertips than ever before. Yet, how much of that hotel data is truly focused on what is delighting your current guests?
By trying to be the best at everything, you risk overwhelming your guests with options they didn’t ask for. You might also lose sight of what truly works for a specific hotel, brand, location, demographic, and more. It’s much easier to return a happy guest than to start all over with a brand-new lead.
At myDigitalOffice, we know hotel data. For busy hoteliers, intuitive hotel data mining in an all-in-one platform is a dream come true. To learn more, request a demo today.
