Data plays an important role in every step of managing successfully your hotel.
Every single department contributes with insightful data that help take the next steps in the right direction. And that can be in terms of productivity, costs, sales and improved guest experience.
Back in March, Isabel, our Head of Customer Development, has shared insights at Travel Tech, together with other great industry players.
Below you can have a look at some of those insights.
There are many hotels running without any data about some operational departments.
What can be the consequences of it?
Imagine driving blindfold without knowing your fuel, your speed or where you are driving to.
The most common, when we hear about the word data, is to think about revenue management. We all know its importance, but there’s way more.
Because you can have great RevPAR and at the same time very high operational costs. So where’s your profitability here?
How do you know how much is costing your housekeeping? Or how much is costing you not doing a preventive maintenance task? Or how much is costing you the overproduction at your restaurant? And the list goes on!
Of course, with the amount of data hoteliers have nowadays (or some of them), it’s really important to know where to look at, because it can be very overwhelming.
“Data is an essential factor in every single business. It gives you a 360-degree view of your hotel business and opportunities for growth.“
Without it you will certainly not improve your operations, because you simply don’t know its performance.
And if you don’t know what needs to be improved, how can you improve it? How to know which processes that you have in place don’t work anymore or never did?
Data, data, data!
When we talk about improving operations, we should be talking about sitting with your team, analyzing your current processes, and replacing them with smarter processes.
We’re talking about productivity, about reducing costs, increasing revenue. About flexible and strong tools to support you on all of this.
And these tools need to collect high-quality data and convert it into readable insights for you to analyse and make informed and faster decisions.
“Without relevant hotel operations data, hoteliers take decisions based on assumptions, which drive many hotels to close. You simply don’t know where you can automate.”
Alongside, your competitors that are using data effectively have a huge advantage in comparison with you.
In a nutshell, having accurate and relevant data available, understanding what is required, regardless of the department, setting the right KPIs, will drive your hotel operations to the maximum efficiency.
Data in hospitality plays a critical role, however, with the amount of data that can be collected in hotels nowadays, is all data valueable for a hotel business?
No, not all data is valuable!
Is it valuable to have fuel info on an electric car when what you need it’s to know your battery level?
Of course, this is a dummy example.
And there are many different reasons that can explain why not all data is valuable.
‣ The first one can be due to the fact that this data is not properly translated into actionable insights, which make it very difficult to read, understand and make decisions out of it.
For instances, if you have multiple systems, it can be a real struggle to analyse insights that are transformed in different ways and most importantly, analyse data that are not correlated to each other.
Meaning you will need to do it yourself. And believe me, you don’t want to go back to excel for it!
‣ Your teams’ training plays also a significant role in how valuable and reliable can be your data. And why’s that?
They’re the ones logging data into your tech stack, every single day.
- The front desk adds guest information, manages reservations, bills and so on.
- F&B team manages the restaurant bookings, guest preferences (if they have a system for that), controls food delivery and overproduction.
- Engineering team logs faults, actions performed in both corrective and preventive tasks, etc. If they have a system for it, otherwise, paper or excel will be the data source.
- The housekeeping team logs the rooms cleaned, inspected, the DND, minibar posting, times, etc. Again, if they have a solution for it, otherwise paper and excel will be.
So when I talk about training properly your teams, I’m talking about the importance of logging data in the same way, no matter the department.
But if you have 5 different systems to log data, that are not connected to each other, this will certainly be a difficulty!
‣ Knowing well your real hotel’s needs, the needs of each operational department.
Different data will be important in different situations, so it’s important to acknowledge your hotel business pains in every various moments and how to use the data you have at your disposal.
At the end of the day, you really need to set your KPIs and make the data you have available work for your hotel business.
Want to know more?