The Data-Driven Hotelier

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. March 10, 2016

In an effort to help our peers compete, we at ALICE sat down with a roundtable of New York City's leading hotel General Managers to learn how they are leveraging data to run their hotels. We share our findings in our report, “The Data-Driven Hotelier.”

Today's leading hoteliers agree knowing how to gather, analyze and leverage data can have a huge impact on their hotel's bottom line, as well as their reputation.

Interestingly, while all of the managers we spoke with agree data is among the most important elements of running their business, they all shared the same pain points. Specifically, they hope to use data to better understand their guests, track their employee productivity, and monitor their levels of inventory.

To gain an understanding of their guests, these GMs currently have to compile guest profiles by pulling “breadcrumbs” of data from their booking information and post-stay surveys, and manually input notes into their CRMs. Not only does this make it difficult to personalize the guest experience, it also makes it difficult to identify the guests that are most valuable to their hotels' bottom lines. Further, because they're unable to accurately track the way their employees are spending their time, they trust their managers to make staffing decisions using their gut or previous experience, both of which are highly error-prone solutions.

Of all the issues we cover, none resonated as much as the importance of managing one's online reputation. It's no surprise online reviews have become both an increasingly important data source as well as a major influence in future bookings. As such, the hoteliers in this piece closely monitor their scores and actively work to keep them high. From hiring a dedicated relationship manager to obsessively scanning their guests' social media, each has developed their own strategy for improving their online reviews.

While still in the early days of running a truly data-driven hotel operation, the leaders we interviewed were all optimistic about its future. The tools through which hoteliers gather data will reduce the chance for human error and as they become savvier about what metrics matter most to their operation, their data will become increasingly impactful. Over time, this will create a positive feedback loop that will give the hoteliers that take advantage of this data a significant competitive advantage against those that are slower to embrace its many benefits.

Download the report for insights to how data will help you improve your operation, better understand your guests and improve your reviews: http://ow.ly/Zh225.