3 steps to overcoming your hotel data management problems
With high hopes, your hotel marketing team sends out a targeted email campaign to promote a special golf package for a specific guest segment.
But there’s a problem.
A significant number of emails bounce back because they’re invalid. Or they get tossed into spam due to misspelled names in the subject line or because the individual received multiple copies of the same promotion.
It’s the result of ineffective hotel data management.
When your guest database is filled with outdated, inaccurate, and duplicate information, you hurt revenue opportunities and damage your brand reputation — not to mention waste time and resources.
As a hotelier, you know how essential it is for your guest data to be clean, accurate, up-to-date, and secure. But that goal is difficult to achieve without the right technology in place. A solid data platform empowers properties to produce more effective marketing campaigns, deliver more personalized guest experiences, and achieve higher revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at hotel data management and how to do it right.
What is hotel data management?
Hotels deal with ever-growing mountains of first-party data. It comes in daily from guest interactions with disparate sources like your hotel website, social media channels, and via in-person and phone conversations. It can get pretty overwhelming.
This is why hotel data management is a game-changer. It’s an organized practice that involves collecting, consolidating, storing, and leveraging data, often with the help of a sophisticated customer data platform, to be both as efficient and effective as possible. The right platform is particularly important, as it continuously cleanses and synthesizes guest data into robust profiles that are easy to access.
Key challenges of hotel data management
Now, it’s time to dig into just why effective hotel data management is so difficult. It all comes down to a few primary issues.
Dirty guest data
Every touchpoint your guests reach during their booking journeys — your booking engine, reservation calls, on-property outlet transactions, OTAs, different property locations, etc. — offers opportunities to learn more about your guests. And at the same time, they introduce more opportunities for dirty data.
Dirty data includes duplicate and conflicting guest profiles. For a single guest, you may have multiple profile versions with different spellings of their name, differing email addresses, work vs. home address, and more. As a result, you have no clear, centralized view of that guest. This makes marketing and revenue management forecasting nearly impossible, especially when you consider how many guest profiles can be affected.
Complex and overwhelming data clean-up
Hotels have new data streaming in constantly. Even without the current labor shortage, you simply don’t have the staff, money, or time to devote to the never-ending, time-consuming task of manually cleaning up your database.
Why is data management in hospitality important?
Provides an accurate view of guests
First-party data is the springboard for all your hotel marketing and customer experience efforts. And when your data is effectively managed, you no longer waste resources cleaning up your database. Hospitality technology solutions, including a robust data platform, leave you free to transform data into actionable insights that benefit your business.
Maximizes campaign performance
Sound hotel data management practices let you accurately segment your guests so you can better target the right people at the right time with the right message. Your campaigns become stickier, creating real connections.
Sound too good to be true? There’s evidence showing just how much the right solutions matter. A recent report for Sojern shows that after implementing a first-party data system, hotel marketers saw a 76% increase in campaign performance.
Increases guest satisfaction
Research shows that 86% of travelers want a more personalized experience at hotels. There’s also evidence that 76% of people get frustrated when that doesn’t happen.
With the right system for hotel data management, you’re able to build guest satisfaction and loyalty by ensuring you appropriately recognize each guest and accurately anticipate their needs.
Boosts revenue
Effective data management in hospitality helps you more easily identify trends and new revenue streams. Research supports this, noting that nearly 9 out of 10 hotel marketers find a first-party data system is effective in maximizing overall revenue.
3 steps to master hotel data management
Step 1: Standardize the data
Technology experts specializing in data management for the hospitality industry offer highly sophisticated platforms equipped with AI and machine learning. Advanced systems like these automatically cleanse the data, stripping away all formatting from contact entries.
For instance, all parentheses, dashes, and periods are removed from phone numbers in Revinate. The system’s algorithm will then compare similar profiles, evaluating as many data fields as possible. Anomalies and duplications are eliminated, and true matches are synthesized and merged together to offer a standardized view of each guest.
AI and machine learning-powered systems are also fantastic in that they work 24/7/365, and their accuracy continually improves. So, you know that you’re dealing with the most precise guest data possible at any given moment.
Step 2: Make it accessible across all systems
As you well know, your hotel deals with multiple systems. Your reservations, marketing, sales, revenue management, housekeeping, and F&B teams all need access to accurate guest data in order to provide optimal guest experiences. Yet nearly one-third of hoteliers say system integration is a top tech challenge.
The right hotel data platform is built on secure, modern cloud technology that makes guest profiles easily accessible across all your systems. It centralizes data within a single dashboard, so you can quickly assess the health of your database. And it keeps data protected while enabling cross-team and cross-property visibility in real time.
Step 3: Draw actionable insights
Once you have your freshly cleaned, fully merged, and accessible guest profiles, it’s go time! You can finally start putting your data to work, drawing actionable insights to help improve guest experiences and grow your business.
For instance, you can easily see which profiles are missing key information, like email addresses, and create a customized plan for obtaining them.
Accurate guest profiles also enhance your personalization efforts and provide greater upsell opportunities. Case in point, you can offer vacationing couples in-room amenities like chilled champagne or a fresh fruit basket for an additional fee. And busy families may be thrilled to dish out a few extra bucks for the convenience of late check-out.
Clean guest data also helps you hone your communication strategies, making them infinitely more effective. You can get granular with your customer segmentation to create highly targeted messaging that drives true loyalty and conversions. Those strategies will translate directly into your bottom line — 76% of consumers are more likely to purchase from your brand when you engage with them in a personalized way.
Sound hotel data management holds the key
Effective hotel data management practices are crucial, and the right platform will make it that much easier. You’ll improve customer satisfaction through more personalized engagement. You’ll optimize your marketing efforts through easy access to rich, accurate guest data. And the icing on the cake — you’ll benefit your bottom line.
About Revinate
Revinate is a direct booking platform that leads the hospitality industry in driving direct revenue and increased profitability.
Our products and our people combine to give hoteliers the superpowers they need to crush their goals. With Revinate, hoteliers shift share away from OTAs and drive tangible results across an individual property or a portfolio. Our industry-leading, AI-powered, customer data platform collects, unifies and, synthesizes data giving hoteliers a foundational advantage.
Hoteliers gain critical intelligence – guest lifetime spend, stay preferences, ancillary revenue, and more. With our Rich Guest Profiles database, hoteliers don't need to guess who their most profitable guests are, or how to drive conversions across email, voice, messaging, and digital channels.
Revinate's direct booking platform and omnichannel communication technology powers 900+ million Rich Guest Profiles across 12,500+ hotels to drive over $17 billion in direct revenue.
Sanjana Chappalli
VP of Brand Marketing and Communications
Revinate, Inc.
