Brittain's North Beach Resort & Villas — Photo by Brittain Resorts & Hotels

When the first ChatGPT demo was released in November 2022, like many people, it immediately caught the eyes of leadership at Brittain Resorts & Hotels. They saw an instant ability to rely on generative AI to make team members across the company more efficient.

Almost immediately, leadership collectively decided to lean in on AI. The Myrtle Beach-based owner-operator with a portfolio of 17 properties in and around the beach promoted Jeremy Slone to Director of Technology with the directive of moving the company toward a more data-driven approach to resort operations, specifically in the areas of Business Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence.

Slone started by sharing the initiative with the wider company and educating team members on how generative AI can be a resource for each of them. He was determined to capitalize on AI across each department in every way possible. The initiative went from writing blogs and marketing copy to strategically leveraging data and AI to propel growth and position Brittain for sustained success.

Beyond making team members more efficient, Brittain is leaning heavily on AI to aggregate data across the many systems that make up its evolving tech stack and present it in easily digestible formats that will keep key stakeholders informed and lead to smarter business decisions.

A critical piece of that process is the use of MDO’s Business Intelligence Platform. MDO’s BI Platform allows hoteliers to centralize data across their hospitality enterprise and builds automated operational reports and dynamic visualizations, relying on hundreds of industry-specific integrations and the ability to tailor analysis by custom segments. MDO provides key integrations to PMS, F&B, accounting and payroll systems to centralize performance data and populate daily reports and dashboards.

“A big push for us has been leaning into Power BI – taking all the data we have coming in through MDO and supplementing it with other sources of data,” Slone said. “Generative AI by itself is very exciting, but the most beneficial side of AI is the machine learning, or the ability to analyze data sets. With generative AI in combination with Power BI dashboards, it's not just graphs and charts, but we can do short analysis of those numbers and put them in a more common language.”

Data-Driven Solutions

Brittain selected MDO’s BI Platform to centralize data from each of its 17 properties, including revenue, sales and transactional data from the PMS, as well as accounting, payroll, and food-and-beverage data from various Point-of-Sale systems. MDO has automated the process of manually collecting data from each system, each day.

“MDO has been critical in helping us get our company’s data extracted and stored and will undoubtedly be an invaluable resource for future integrations,” Slone said.

Brittain relied on some standard, out-of-the-box reports and Power BI dashboards in MDO’s BI Platform, and then worked with the MDO team to create reports and dashboards that fit their unique needs. Gone are hours of work each day manually exporting or keystroking data from each revenue source across each of their properties.

Today, the team sends about 20 daily reports – as well as a few on weekly and monthly cadences – some of which are automated through MDO and others through Power BI. Some reports are unique to specific properties or groups of properties. “The next step is to get the data in a more visual environment where each team member can receive a personalized view of the information that is most important to them,” Slone said.

Custom dashboards for each department will provide each level of management within the company to view exactly the data that they need.

“With the integration of AI into Power BI, we can extract deeper insights from our data, uncovering trends, patterns, and anomalies that were previously hidden,” he said. “This empowers data-driven decision-making and enhances business intelligence.”

Technological Transitions

To facilitate the development of a comprehensive interconnected system throughout the company, Brittain embarked on a journey of system upgrades, enabling the transition of data into cloud-based environments. These adjustments encompass various aspects of the technological infrastructure and have a profound impact on the company's nimbleness.

Slone has recognized numerous areas where AI can play a pivotal role in improving operations. Brittain has already begun implementing AI in several domains, including:

  • Guest Data – Enhancing guest experiences and owner interactions by utilizing AI to analyze guest sentiment and draw insights from customer reviews.
  • Social Media Management – Streamlining social media management by leveraging AI for automating tasks, scheduling posts, and generating content.
  • CRS – Implementing generative AI and voice synthesis for optimizing Customer Relationship Systems (CRS), enhancing customer interactions by reducing wait times and abandonment rates.
  • Guest Messaging – Exploring AI's potential for analyzing guest demographics and visit motivations to enable tailored communication approaches. Slone sees opportunity to use AI to analyze guest types and the reasons they are visiting, which helps staff craft unique guest communication paths.
  • Revenue Management – Through its Revenue Management System, Brittain can leverage AI and real-time data analytics to maximize revenue and make quick strategy adjustments.

A Future Shaped by AI

Leveraging data and AI along its growth journey, Brittain Resorts & Hotels has emerged as a trailblazer in hospitality. The company is realizing tangible results from its data-driven evolution by successfully consolidating data sources to provide the right information for key business decisions.

As Slone looks toward the future, he hopes to incorporate more data sources and expects AI to play a more substantial role in providing real-time information and notifications. Predictive and prescriptive analysis will help Brittain tackle anomalies in the data earlier to provide a quicker response and a better all around guest experience.

The AI-driven evolution at Brittain will help the company capture market share and position it for future success.To learn more about how MDO can help you centralize data across your tech stack for deeper analysis on business performance, contact MDO here.

Jason Freed
Hospitality Data Evangelist
3302216068
Otelier (formerly myDigitalOffice)

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