Towards a Data-Driven and Learning Hotel & Travel Industry

The hotel industry is entering a new post-Covid era of digitization and integration, arriving at high speed due to increasing uncertainty in the market with high inflation, a tight labour market, and curbed consumer spending. These factors make it highly challenging for the industry to maintain the guest experience while keeping margins sustainable. What makes these macro trends even more difficult is that the traditional Property Management System(PMS), which was once at the centre of the hotel industry, has become a legacy system due to the increasing number of new microservices and the changing distribution landscape. These new services aim to improve various aspects of the guest journey, including operations, guest-facing services, distribution, and marketing. These new services may add value to the guest and supplier, whether they add value to individual hotels is to be seen.

The increasing number of new microservices in the hotel industry has resulted in the loss of the traditional PMS central role. These new services, here to stay, have made the hotel industry a data-driven industry. However, this led to a fragmented system landscape creating inconsistent data and an incomplete view of the guest journey, making it challenging for hotels to understand guests and their behaviour completely. The solution for the hotel industry lies in becoming a learning industry adopting data within decision-making and treating data as the asset it is.

Understanding the True Value

While these services may benefit specific aspects of the guest journey, they can also create additional costs or data loss, often overseen in a business and investment case. Therefore, while these new services may offer benefits, it is crucial for hotels to carefully consider the potential costs and impact on the guest experience to understand the actual value.

Complete digitization and integration of systems within the guest journey can help hotels overcome macroeconomic challenges. An optimized guest journey provides a more efficient and cost-effective way of managing operations, improves the guest experience, and gains a better understanding of guests. 

Creating a Learning Organization

Hotels must invest in understanding the value of integrated systems and prioritize those that will help them reach their business goals and guest experience objectives. Doing so will put them on the path towards becoming a learning organization, structurally challenging new trends and technologies, and maintaining margins at sustainable levels. We have defined the following steps to support hotels in this process, founded on the Four-St method of Abykys:

1. Start with building Guiding Coalition – Becoming data-driven requires different skills. What are the aims of the guiding coalition?  Traditional departments need to align and strengthen each other. Representatives of IT, Finance, and Business should be aligned. With these stakeholders, a fundament is created for a strong feedback loop to measure the results of implementation, integration, and execution from different organizational perspectives. Ensure this coalition is empowered and skilled to bring your organization to the next level. 
2. Align business goals with your vision – Investing requires careful consideration of goals, resources, and the internal and external system environment. Hotels must define their target guest and identify the best property management system to serve guests and other services needed to facilitate an optimized guest journey. Any other investments that contribute to the goal should be outsourced or discarded.
3. Always measure success – Start with gaining insight into where your organization stands. What is the maturity level of being data-driven, and what are data priorities? Rank new initiatives on impact and complexity with a data prioritization map. Along the process of implementation, integration, and execution, keep measuring. When you start measuring, it is not all about success: you will see failures. Failures are the best opportunity to learn, iterate and grow. With that said, keep sharing successes along the learning path, motivating and inspiring your organization.
4. Start Experimenting, start learning – Start experimenting to improve value in the guest journey. By experimenting, hotels can start learning by design and become learning organizations allowing hotels to continuously improve the guest experience by making informed decisions based on data and results from experiments.

In conclusion, becoming a data-driven organization is essential for hotels to keep margins on a sustainable level and remain relevant to their guests. By valuing data as an asset, hotels can start investing in the right solutions to help them become data-driven and better understand their guests, create a personalized experience, and optimize operations. We would love to hear your thoughts on this article and how you think the hotel industry can become data-driven. Let’s start a discussion in the comments section below!