In this latest episode of Hotel Moment, Karen Stephens sits down with Adam Mogelonsky, a Partner at Hotel Mogel Consulting Ltd. Adam delves into the pivotal role of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) in revolutionizing hotel tech ecosystems, offering insights on how these tools streamline operations and enhance guest experiences. Discover how high-quality data can drive personalized marketing, improve email campaigns, and create a continuous feedback loop for refining hotel services. Tune in to explore the future of hotel tech, data-driven strategies, and the impact of seamless integration on delivering exceptional guest experiences.

Meet your host

As Chief Marketing Officer at Revinate, Karen Stephens is focused on driving long-term growth by building Revinate’s brand equity, product marketing, and customer acquisition strategies. Her deep connections with hospitality industry leaders play a key role in crafting strategic partnerships.

Karen is also the host of The Hotel Moment Podcast, where she interviews top players in the hospitality industry. Karen has been with Revinate for over 11 years, leading Revinate’s global GTM teams. Her most recent transition was from Chief Revenue Officer, where she led the team in their highest booking quarter to date in Q4 2023.

Karen has more than 25 years of expertise in global hospitality technology and online distribution — including managing global accounts in travel and hospitality organizations such as Travelocity and lastminute.com

Connect with Karen

Transcript

Intro – 00:00:04: Welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast presented by Revinate, the podcast where we discuss how hotel technology shapes every moment of the hotelier’s experience. Tune in as we explore the cutting edge technology transforming the hospitality industry and hear from experts and visionaries shaping the future of guest experiences. Whether you’re a hotelier or a tech enthusiast, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in and discover how we can elevate the art of hospitality together.

Karen Stephens – 00:00:36: Hello, and welcome to the Hotel Moment podcast. I’m your host, Karen Stephens, the Chief Marketing Officer of Revinate. And today on the podcast, we’re thrilled to have Adam Mogelonsky. Adam is a hospitality professional with quite a diverse skillset. He is a partner at Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited, where he specializes in growth, equity raises, and technology planning for upscale and luxury hotels and resorts. With over 15 years of industry experience, Adam focuses on revenue modeling, optimizing margins, and integrating new technology and wellness opportunities. He’s also an advisor at Growth Advisors International Network, which is known as GAIN, providing strategic insights on commercial expansion and tech innovation. His expertise extends to real-time data utilization, optimizing tech stacks, and discovering new revenue streams, making him a predominant thought leader in the hospitality industry. So I think if I could sum up our discussion in just a few words, Adam has vast experience in hospitality. He has his own podcast, which is fantastic. And he’s done a lot of reading, writing, and consulting on the topic of customer data platforms. So we really go deep into what is a customer data platform? Why is it important in the hospitality industry? And he’s got some really good insights. When you start to think about getting all of that data into one place, making sure it’s standardized so that it can be used across many different activation channels. So he has a very succinct definition. So definitely give a listen to that. I think what’s also great, the perspective that Adam gives in terms of the role of hotels with sustainability, what you can be doing with wellness, and how that gathering all of that data can help drive those initiatives as well. And he kind of intersperses that discussion throughout our conversation. So he really is someone who has spent a lot of time in this space with luxury hotels and advising on the best way to take technology and implement that to drive whatever goals you have as an organization. And then the last thing that I’ll say, and that I agree with Adam wholeheartedly, is just how wonderful it is to work in hospitality and how hospitality really sits in the center of being able to understand different cultures and travel internationally and how that really makes a difference in terms of bringing us all together as a global community. So that’s a good one as well. And here you go. I give you Adam. Welcome to the podcast, Adam. We’re happy to have you here.

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:03:07: Thanks for having me.

Karen Stephens – 00:03:08: So Adam, you and I have done a lot of collaboration lately on Hospitality Net. We’ve both done quite a bit of writing about customer data platforms. So can we just start, kick off the discussion with what is a customer data platform and why should somebody in hospitality care about it?

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:03:24: The best way that I describe a CDP customer data platform is the glue or the piping. And if you think about what a house is under the scenes with, you have your multiple washrooms, sinks, kitchen, kitchen sink, everything. There’s a lot of stuff that’s in between the walls that brings the water to and away. And connects it all, whether you’re in an apartment building or a house. And hotels have a lot of data in various silos is the term we use for it, the most prominent of which is the property management system. But then if you’re offering any services, you have different data silos, whether that’s sales and catering, restaurant POS, and then getting into ancillaries like spa, golf, activities, working with third-party providers, procurement, all these various silos. And the problem we have with the data is not only that it’s just in different silos, but that it’s structured differently, where all the data is essentially coming down to a database, which has different columns, different rows, different ways of delineating those individual points of when guest A came in, when exactly he or she arrived, what they spent their money on, where they spent their money, how did they pay? Is there any residual stuff left over on the folio? All that fun little tidbits. And a CDP is what brings it over to one common place, and then it also structures it into a common format. So that way, all that data is brought in to be interpreted by whomever, a great marketing team, a sales team that wants to figure out how best to approach. Or nowadays, we can talk about machine learning against that database.

Karen Stephens – 00:05:19: Absolutely. And I’m sure people can hear this in your answer, and I hit on it when I introduced you. You have a vast background in consulting for hospitality, and you’ve been doing this for numbers of years. So maybe it’d be great if we took a minute just to talk a little bit about your experience when you think about a CDP now and how things have evolved in the industry. But what brought you into hospitality consulting, and why do you like it so much?

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:05:43: What brought me in is my father. We used to have an advertising marketing communications agency in Toronto that focused on the hospitality and tourism industry. That was my first real job coming out of university at age 21. And I say real job, I was a physiotherapist, personal trainer before that. So first real job. And just sort of stuck with it from there. We sold that firm and then got into consulting myself and my father. He’s my business partner. So multi-generational, he’s a boomer. I’m a millennial. We are very polite and friendly and fun to everyone else. And then behind the scenes, we swear and yell at each other to arrive at the best solution. But that’s generally how partnerships work, right? So what I keep loving about hospitality is how integral it is to the global world nowadays. And this is in so many more ways than just technology and tech innovation. When we think about the word innovation, yes, technology is a thing, yes, hotels are innovating by helping technology firms and building out whichever new piece of the tech stack. But innovation is also something like supporting a young chef and helping them launch a restaurant concept and really stewarding them to innovate a new cuisine and new culinary types. So there’s so many examples of foods that were invented within hotel restaurants. And then as well, you talk about being stewards of the arts and how a lot of luxury hotels and upper upscale, the areas of the spectrum where I work. We adorn our halls with artwork, and we try to tell a story by supporting local artists, local craftsmen, local supply chains. If we’re doing any sort of FF&E improvement and we want to use local goods. So we’re bringing money back into the economy. And then also we are stewards of the communities. We support the community where there’s so many examples of a hotel coming in place and then revitalizing the hyperlocal area by supporting local businesses, by bringing people in, by offering, again, great F&B products to bring locals together and offering them a gathering point. And we’re also big stewards of spa and wellness, which is another important vehicle by simply having spas and having great spa teams and supporting them and offering them a source of revenue via hotel guests. We are helping support wellness and the betterment of mankind, dare I say it that grandiosely. And then you bring all that together and you think about the fact that the more cultures intersect via travel, the more we realize how much in common we all have and the better off we all are. So I posit that the more travel there is worldwide, the more peaceful we are as a planet. Again, that’s grandiose. But, I could probably write a PhD to find some sort of data to support that using a CDP, of course.

Karen Stephens – 00:08:58: Of course. Well, I’ll tell you what, I support that 100%. When I was at university, I had the great honor and privilege to study abroad in France for a year and absolutely changed my life. And so I agree with you 100%. The more that we travel, the more that we understand different
cultures and different foods and different experiences, and really hotels sit at the center of that. And I think bringing it back to the CDP discussion, which I love that you did that as well, you talked about all of the different ancillary things that can happen in a hotel. I mean, the way I like to think about it is there’s all of this data out there. It’s across all different pieces of the guest experience. A CDP is looking to get that all into one place, standardize the data, structure the data in a way so that it can be used. And then on top of that is the guest experience, which is the fun bit that we all want to experience. But can you talk a little about the evolution now? We have CDP kind of came on the scene in 2018 for the rest of the world. How have you seen tech adoption on the hospitality side with the CDP in 2024?

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:10:01: In 2024, it is either has been adopted or everyone has a strategic plan to utilize some form of central interlocutor for their technology. And the whole purpose of that, there are many purposes to think about it strategically. Number one, bringing all the data into the right place. Everyone knows that once the data is centralized, can be properly read, you can do a lot more with it to incrementally build more revenues or to save on profits. And the other word there, of course, to tie in is business intelligence, which can look to integrate not only guest-facing data, but capital asset tracking, preventative maintenance, and a lot of the labor management tools to do proper total profitability calculations. So there is a clear and present business case for having a CDP. The other is simply just time, where before the CDP, it was all about these APIs came onto the scene a little bit earlier than that, and they really allowed IT professionals to have this common way of bringing together one-way or two-way connections. But each of those still had to be set up and test it as a one-way connection. And now with a CDP, it’s a little bit like having a USB stick or a USB drive on your laptop, where rather than trying to find an individual thing like, oh, does this monitor plug? It’s the old type. It doesn’t mix with the HDMI cable. So therefore I can’t fit in this monitor. I got to go back and find a one-to-one converter. Now it’s just everything is USB in and out. And that allows hotels to have more control over their vendors, their individual vendors, where if the CDP is now the keystone of a hotel technology ecosystem, then all those individual players that maybe are, dare I use the term, legacy, they now have to rapidly innovate. And we’re not beholden to saying, well, This booking engine isn’t allowing me to do packaging properly, but all my guest data is there and it has the strong connection with my PMS. So I have to use it. Maybe isn’t the best example, but eventually, if everything is going in and out of the CDP and we’re able to properly in real time, bring together PMS data and securitized any sort of credit card information, as well as rooms and room inventory. Then that allows us to not be beholden to any legacy system that maybe is preventing us from innovating the guest experience. Be that a booking engine where we can’t package all of our great products that we have or even do any sort of attribute-based sales, early check in, late checkout, bed type, all that fun new stuff that’s coming. But it really comes down to having that USB stick, that CDP as the central thing that everything is universally plugged in. And then from there, you can decide how to build out around the CDP.

Karen Stephens – 00:13:15: I love that. Now, I will say that Revinate has a CDP. We’ve been building it for a number of years. At the core of our CDP is what we call Advanced Profile Synthesis, also known as identity resolution. And for us, this is really the engine, because I think that the risk now, as you said, it’s pretty prolific. A lot of people claim to have a CDP. But for us, a CDP, you can have multiple inputs. You’ve got to be able to standardize that data. You’ve got to be able to take everything in. You have to be able to activate that data. But the core of that is the profile. So can you talk a little bit about the importance of having a profile that is reliable and merged and deduped correctly? And that might be leading the witness. But that’s really, for us, what we think is important.

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:14:00: Yeah, leading the witness. The whole thing is that your data has to be of a high caliber. We can use different statistical terms to talk about what we know about our guests and, oh, we can only say this or that. But realistically, when you want to do any sort of one-to-one marketing or you want to find out who your guests are to inform the future of packages, the future of sales, if you have a bunch of guests where all you know about them is their email and their first and last name or the email is an alias of an OTA for that particular segment, it’s going to skew all the statistics and it’s going to prevent you from really doing that deep dive on what are the emotional drivers behind why a guest is booking with you, rebooking with you, spending more with you, or recommending to their friends. And that is really the core of the revenue funnel. And the age-old advertising adage is that it is far easier to keep an existing client than to find a new one on a sheer marketing basis. So the more you know about the people who have come to your property in the past, the more you can go back to them. And instead of saying, oh, we have this new offer, does it happen to coincide with what you’re interested? We can come back with things like, oh, we see your anniversary is coming up in two months time and that you stayed with us two years ago for that. Would you like the exact same thing to relive that moment only with this new type of champagne that we just got in? Because the other one, maybe you want to change things up just a bit. And we still have that same prefix menu, but it’s been updated since two years when you’ve been here. And you can get really granular. And at the very least, you’re demonstrating that you care whether they book that or not. They’ll be like, oh, you know, we stayed there two years ago. Really, we’re thinking about coming back for our fifth year anniversary. Sure. Why not? You’re demonstrating value, demonstrating you know them in that particular example. But also, you’re not spamming them. You’re not saying just this is just a hotel sending me random stuff here. And it’s a long newsletter where it’s the quote unquote shotgun approach. There I got the bunny ears right. Shotgun instead of sniper. Sniper. And then they unsubscribe. And one thing that I look at in that regard with newsletters specifically is I don’t trust open rates. I trust click throughs. And I look at unsubscribes. And unsubscribes. Even if you’re getting, let’s say, a 0.5% unsubscribe. That is compounding in terms of total number and compound interest. That’s the eighth wonder of the world. It works for unsubscribes the same way. But I don’t trust open rates because people might open an email and they’re like, well, I didn’t see anything I like here next and then you lose them. So getting back to the leading nature of this, and I got a little bit off tangent there, but it allows you to get more granular with the data to inform the future of marketing, as well as get real analytics on those emotional drivers. I said the marketing angle from this anniversary example, people coming back to celebrate and how you can do more one-to-one offers, but then you could also get information on that. So you sent out, you developed, you had real data. And you sent out this anniversary offer. Great. How many people opened it? How many people clicked it? How many people replied to it? How many people booked it? How many people took the time to call up and then book because they wanted something very customized to make it extra special? And realistically, it creates this virtuous cycle where you’re able to do more specific marketing. Then you get more data on what worked, what didn’t. And then you refine, refine, refine. And then eventually you involve the operations team and you say, hey, listen. We have this anniversary package that we’re rolling out three-month lead time from arrival on a monthly basis to select people because we have enough data to do that properly. Because we’ve integrated the comments field on the PMS into something that’s actually actionable. Great. But we’re finding from that that people really want this specific setup in the rooms. What would it take to make that a brand standard or to carve out an elevated room type that we can then charge more money for? So it’s this virtuous cycle.

Karen Stephens – 00:18:42: I want to make a couple comments there. First of all, we see in our data over and over again that the more that you segment and personalize your emails, the better the click-through rate, the better the conversion. So we recommend our hotels, instead of blasting 20,000 people at once, do four campaigns of 5,000 and really start to target. Because you can target as wide and as specifically as you like. But we do see over and over again, if you know that I don’t have children and I like spas, a message to me that is bespoke about spas instead of the family pool is going to be a higher conversion rate. And then I think the other thing that you hit on is really getting that information back to the rich guest profile, back to the hotel so that you can really understand what the guest gets on property, what they do, and then being able to pick up data throughout the guest journey. So from the booking to the survey all the way through. And then another thing that you hit on right at the top of this conversation was that ancillary revenue. So I know that wellness and spa is something near and dear to your heart. You talked about restaurants and all that. Can you talk a little bit about ancillary revenue, TRevPAR, and the importance of being able to capture and optimize that data?

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:19:52: So I work at the luxury and upper upscale levels. And what we’re seeing for some properties is now these ancillaries, they can equal guest room revenues on a one-to-one ledger basis. But the relationship is a little bit more entangled than that because your property needs a strong reason to visit. This isn’t just heads and beds like the economy or budget level where people are coming in, staying with you, and that’s it. They’re visiting your property to engage and use those ancillaries, whatever they are. So the ancillary revenue on paper may be the same as the nightly rate, but over time you can measure the relationship between ancillary utilization and other room attributes, increased length of stay, booking pace, or it might book early, which spools out labor and reduces costs ever so slightly. They may book a higher room type. You can measure that. That’s maybe a little bit more in the RMS camp than the actual CDP. And then also over time is that your ancillaries are the justification for raising your nightly rate. So you have increased nightly rate, increased LOS, which then reduces costs and smooths out occupancy gaps. Increased ancillary total spend, you can measure with TRevPAR, and then of course, increased or higher room type utilization, which is again going to boost your ADR if you can tie that back to up-leveling your rooms. So it is a win-win situation that belies a mountain of work and concerted work across multiple departments to really get those together. I would stress, and this is a point of clarification, is there are three different terms emerging. There is TRevPAR, that’s total revenue. So that is revenue across all silos. That includes rooms, ancillaries, like restaurant and spa and golf that the guest is going to use, as well as stay independent. So you can have stay independent revenue as part of a total TRevPAR calculation being gift boutique sales by locals who aren’t staying in the hotel. So it’s a different guest profile, or you could have online gift cards or in-person gift cards or any sort of purchase that is made independent of a hotel guest folio. The other two terms besides TRevPAR that you can run calculations against are RevPOR, revenue per occupied room, which will show things a little bit differently because that may take into account multiple occupants. And then RevPAG, which is revenue
per available guest, which is going to show, break that down according to not just the guest folio, which is total occupants per room, but how each individual person is spending while on site. And I bring up that third term and the second term as a point of differentiation because increasingly we’re seeing these calculations and these metrics to be very critical for finding out how blended travel or bleisure guests are utilizing the property. To offer a specific case there before passing it back to you is the classic case of two people traveling together for a hotel. One spouse is going there for a conference, which is the reason to visit, while the other is working remotely and utilizing the services during the day. That is what we call plus one travel. It is a specific use case within the greater umbrella of blended travel. And you only really know what’s happening if you’re able to break the revenue down across those three folios. If you’re just doing RevPAR, it’s just going to show you what the nightly rate is, which doesn’t take into account that second occupant because they’re probably beyond the group folio, the group master. And if you’re just doing RevPOR, It might not break it down by occupant because it’s all going to be on that master guest profile instead of having a sub-profile within that which would break down the SPA and POS data that might be revealed by the plus one who is utilizing the services.
Karen Stephens – 00:24:18: I’m really curious, the plus one thing, is that something we started tracking before COVID or is that a post-COVID thing in terms of identifying that group and tracking it?

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:24:28: Right. So, bleisure and blended travel was a thing before COVID. We really didn’t have the systems to do it properly across bringing the data across and looking at things like a shoulder night extension and offering that. That was all more or less done on a one-to-one level. And we couldn’t really see how that additional occupant was utilizing the services aside from just anecdotal stuff from having great teams who would relay that information back anecdotally saying, well, we had a such and such group in-house for this event. And I noticed that in the restaurant for lunch, there were three of their spouses here just dining with us. And they mentioned that they were waiting for their spouses to get out of the conference, they could rejoin them for dinner. So, that was done anecdotally. But now we’re able to put data behind that on the property level and then above property as well to see how to augment groups on an ongoing basis.

Karen Stephens – 00:25:30: That is really cool. I think about, again, going back to having the intelligence and the data behind it. If you start to realize that every time you have a conference, you’ve got 50% of the people that are coming have a plus one. How do you think about offering packages or things for that plus one traveler during the day? Oh, okay, your partner’s over here, but you can have this package or this lunch, whatever. So that’s really interesting to think about.

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:25:53: It’s just unlocking additional value. That’s all it is. And I’m a consultant. I’m an exterior person. So I come in to help with these issues. But the directors of marketing at various properties and at brands and management companies, they understand this and they’re working very hard to help hotels capitalize on the opportunity. They understand it. These are very intelligent people who know how to use technology, know how to use data. They know the fundamentals of marketing, and they’re doing really great stuff to see this happen.

Karen Stephens – 00:26:25: That’s great. And I think, obviously, you do a lot of consulting on technology. Do you also help hotels, and we mentioned machine learning, and I know AI is coming up here. Do you also help hotels understand what are the best practices for ensuring that technology helps the human experience and human interactions instead of hindering it? So do you also talk to hotels or help them get over that hurdle of how do you implement technology and still empower your people at the same time?

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:26:51: Right. So technology has always been about empowering people. And the main purpose with all these technologies, artificial intelligence can be insights or it can be automation. So the automation can really help onsite teams. And we’re building that incrementally. Everything is tested before it’s rolled out. And we’re looking to make sure it works. We’re looking to make sure that we don’t run into generalization problems where the patterns are only have a narrow casted use case and then they don’t apply outside of that. So that’s another problem that we have to solve in the sandbox with anything we rolled out, which is why it takes time. And then, of course, there’s the issue of too many notifications, technology, blam, blam, blam, email, email, email, email. And one of the big challenges that we solve for is a mixture of high tech and low tech is just making sure that hoteliers have more time to be guest facing. Hoteliers are in this business because they want to meet with people and sit down with them, have a coffee, exchange ideas, learn about different cultures. They’re not in this business to look at their Outlook inbox. They’re not in this business to respond to 30 notifications that are coming in on their phone. So that is by far the biggest gain that I see, which is automating and streamlining the information.
So that way they can be even more guest-facing.

Karen Stephens – 00:28:25: Amen to that. I have to say, I mean, whether in hospitality or just in business, more communication isn’t necessarily better. So you think about a poor hotelier with different things implemented and getting blown up all the time and having to respond to messages. So I definitely resonate with that. The more automation happening on the back end that doesn’t cause alerts all over the place is going to be the best. So Adam, I have one more question for you. And I think you look across so many different hotels in your role as a consultant. Where do you see hotels having their moment or spark of innovation? And how has increased access to the use of technology played a part in that? So as we’re coming into 2025, is there anything out there you’re seeing that’s like, wow, this is really going to move the needle for the industry besides the CDP, which is phenomenal.

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:29:17: So in terms of moving the needle. The one thing I look at is going back to a word I mentioned earlier, which is stewardship. And. Really, stewardship is, it’s governance, it’s leadership, it’s DEI or corporate social responsibility. It really is. Taking a stance. To over the long term improve the community and the region around you. And there’s so much room to play in that. It can be F&B where we have a mandate now to reduce food waste and to use more local ingredients to bring that to our guests. It can be healthy F&B, which is all about the stuff that I do about, okay, let’s design some healthy menus. Let’s get a nutritionist in house, that sort of thing. It can be support of the local arts. It can be support of local charities. It can be providing more jobs to the local community so they can improve their families when they go home. So the all-encompassing word for this is stewardship. A large part of that is sustainability. The marketing side of stewardship is storytelling. What story are you telling to your guests about why your property has meaning? And I think that every hotel and every hotel brand can just take a moment to think about what their hotel or their brand means to various people, be it locals, be it domestic guests, international guests, managers. What does it mean? And once you really have that meaning and you thought about it. Then the technology underpinning that is really going to serve you to better automate and act as more of this glue, more of this piping to help you realize that vision and that purpose.

Karen Stephens – 00:31:17: I love that. So be a good steward and make sure you can communicate that effectively. That’s great. So thank you, Adam. My guest has been Adam Mogelonsky, who’s a partner at Hotel Mogel Consulting Limited. Thank you for the conversation.

Adam Mogelonsky – 00:31:30: Thanks for having me, Karen.

Outro – 00:31:35: Thank you for joining us on this episode of Hotel Moment by Revinate. Our community of hoteliers is growing every week, and each guest we speak to is tackling industry challenges with the innovation and flexibility that our industry demands. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. And if you’re listening on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more content. For more information, head to revinate.com/hotelmomentpodcast. Until next time, keep innovating.

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