Would you rather spend your days counting chickens or tending to them? Understanding why insight into your hotel performance is essential for reducing costs and achieving optimal room rates, and which bookings provide greatest value.
Historical data and seasonal market trends are little use for today’s decision-making. The pandemic has disturbed typical consumer behaviour and business travel bookings to such an extent that utilising your own data is giving little visibility to market performance and opportunity.
As a result, more businesses are turning to Business Intelligence to weather the almighty Covid-storm with 54% of enterprises saying it’s either critical or very important to their business initiatives. Yet only 27% of business executives said their data and analytics projects produce actionable insights, with 74% of employees feeling uncomfortable working with data (Accenture 2020).
When looking for the right Business Intelligence tool it’s important to select one that is designed for hospitality, one that understands your business and the wider sector. Key insights it should deliver include how individual properties and the group are performing, how different markets are behaving, tapping into past, present and future trends to provide better forecasts – all things to enable quicker, more informed decision-making.
What is Hotel Business Intelligence?
It’s more than a compilation of data and reports. Business Intelligence is the combination of technologies, applications and data practices for the collection, sharing, integration, analysis and presentation of business information. Data pulled from numerous sources can give greater visibility into hotel operations, guest satisfaction, pricing behaviour, revenue generation and market behaviours – and how all these factors are all connected. This allows you to identify market and revenue opportunities.
Prior to the existence of dedicated Business Intelligence tools, reports were manually created, often across multiple spreadsheets, then formatted to crunch the data and obtain visibility on performance. This time intensive, error-prone approach left little room for analysis to identify market opportunities or address longer-term strategies – especially in real-time. Even today, this remains the status quo for many hotels and hospitality brands.
New Business Intelligence applications take on the heavy work: gathering and analysing all the right data points, transforming it so you can make decisions quickly and efficiently.
What problems does BI address for hotels?
For many hotels it’s difficult to get visibility of your overall hotel performance. While there may be a comprehensive revenue management and pricing system, these reports often provide visibility to just one business area. This can prevent you from improving overall performance and operations, or identifying areas to streamline costs.
With a comprehensive Business Intelligence system, hotels can get on top of poor performance management, and look closer at the guest experience to reduce customer churn. The more market data and hotel performance metrics you have, the faster your ability to respond to changeable market conditions. BI tools also help highlight potential risks so they can be averted.
Multiple departments and business units need access to data, often requiring access to similar information. Utilising internal departmental reporting systems leaves business units working in silos. By addressing the ‘data culture’ within your organisation, and aligning all teams to the same platform and shared data, you can have everyone working towards a shared goal, i.e. boosting occupancy for specific dates. This way, hotels can determine relevant and influential KPIs to build a more sustainable and profitable business.
Why is Business Intelligence essential for the hospitality industry today?
Particularly at a time where market behaviours are unprecedented, Business Intelligence provides the insight to adapt to the latest trends while improving marketing and revenue management strategy.
Changing consumer expectations, new business models, and emerging sales channels are challenging hoteliers more than ever before. And in this fast moving world, hotels need to act fast, basing decisions on facts to avoid leaving money on the table.
Guest data is providing valuable insights to improve the customer journey and understand guest preferences to enable sales, marketing and revenue management to better address each customer segment and guest.
Hoteliers who foster a data culture and use Business Intelligence tools have been able to gain intimate details on their most valuable guest, to market to similar audiences and optimise the longer term customer value.
How BI delivers faster decision-making and better pricing structures
With the need to be more responsive to the market, Karisma Hotels & Resorts needed business insights to make the right decisions. The premier hotel and resort management company has 17 luxury brands and 24 properties in six countries. It has grown steadily, but the hotel brand needed access to strong, reliable data to react quickly to changing market conditions.
By utilising SIHOT’s data export function, the group exports data through a direct connection to its own BI system, which creates a customised report, including forecasts and sales source. Through its Business Intelligence dashboard, Karisma has been able to quickly adapt sales and marketing campaigns, conquering new markets. FTI Group also needed greater transparency into the performance and contribution of its properties, a portfolio of 60 hotels with more than 14,000 rooms in nine countries. As a result of migrating to SIHOT.PMS, reporting was standardised throughout the group. This has enabled Meeting Point Hotels to extract the PMS data into its own Business Intelligence tool.
Select SIHOT as your data partner
We have been managing hotel data for over 35 years, helping hotels to organise data structures and provide access to live, real-time information to create customised reports or use one of the 600+ SIHOT reporting templates. Our customers have benefited from different insights depending on their immediate commercial goal. The “Revenue report”, for example, can show accommodation, number of guests or rooms and relate the figures in various combinations. The “TOP report” is another popular analysis with a host of different selection criteria to examine the performance of your top customers in any way you want to look at it.
You can rest assured that you will have access to all the information you need from the SIHOT database to keep track of the different market segments, helping you to determine premium and lower segments, which in turn can have a great influence on your pricing structure.
Security is a priority for us. For clients accessing our cloud-based solutions, all sensitive data is stored in a German server using the most advanced technology. Therefore, subject to the stringent and extensive German laws regarding data protections while you remain the sole proprietor of your data. We also ensure you receive an archived copy of your database every three years to comply with financial laws.
We can help you identify the right business intelligence solution for your budget and KPIs. To discover more about our existing data tools, arrange a call with one of our team.
References
https://www.ezeeabsolute.com/blog/hotel-business-intelligence/
https://www.siteminder.com/best-hotel-business-intelligence/
https://www.mastelhospitality.com/hotel-business-inteligence-to-increase-hotel-revenue/
https://revenue-hub.com/hotels-business-intelligence-tools/
trustradius.com/vendor-blog/business-intelligence-statistics-and-trends