Hoteliers and Data
Hotel managers are not technology people and are perhaps less primed to be data aware. They are already painfully aware that their industry could be further disrupted by the likes of Airbnb and other big data players. In most cases, they have never accessed their data. Hotel IT infrastructures are outdated and error-prone. They tend to rely on various legacy systems and databases that do not communicate with each other. The data this ecosystem produces tends to be unstructured. Any attempt at plugging an off-the-shelf BI tool would be futile without a large data warehouse upstream.Hotels generate data, lots of data
At Boost-inn we sell software solutions to chains of hotels so we see a lot of hotels of different sizes with different operations, needs or even business models. However, all generate data. The first time we plugged Sisense OEM to an average-sized chain of hotels, we had a bit of a revelation. A small chain of 12 regional hotels in France generated data on more than 50,000 reservations per year. This small chain had data on 50,000 credit card holders per year. Compared to a large online retail platform this may seem insignificant but hotels are not online retailers; they are traditional service providers with physical assets and as such rely on foot traffic.Foot traffic with a digital footprint
50,000 people made reservations with their credit card over a 12-month period. These people traveled alone, as couples, as families, on vacation or on business. They ate at the hotels’ restaurants or preferred to go out, they made Spa reservations, booked additional concierge services, went to the bar etc. It is a fact that hotels have lost control of the online booking battle. To some extent they have surrendered the online customer interface to third party providers (OTAs). However, hotels have a marked advantage. It takes second to book a hotel online but guests typically spend anything between 12 hours and a few days on the premises.Data helps hoteliers sell rooms and experiences
As always with data, the fun part starts when users can visualize it intuitively using hotel dashboards.

About the Author
Bahadour is the chief evangelist at Boost-inn. When he is not walking his dog he loves reading and writing about Technology, Data and futurism.
Tags: Data Analysis | Data Visualization