How a hospitality CDP empowers smarter, faster decisions
Which guests should you target? How will you attract them? What package should you offer them to get them to book?
As a hotelier, you make hundreds of daily decisions, big and small. And that can leave you feeling completely drained by the end of each day. Some days it’s like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, isn’t it?
This deluge of choices can lead to a modern phenomenon known as decision fatigue.
Decision fatigue is exactly what it sounds like: the more decisions you have to make over the course of a day, the more mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted you become — which ironically impedes your ability to continue making good decisions. Without even realizing it, your brain starts looking for shortcuts to cope, evidenced by symptoms like procrastination, impulsivity, brain fog, avoidance, and indecision.
Bottom line: decision fatigue can result in poor choices that negatively impact your hotel’s performance.
But with the right tools and processes, you can reduce uncertainty, automate repetitive tasks that take up brain space, and start making better decisions more confidently.
And what happens when you make better decisions? Happier guests. Better reviews. More direct bookings. Increased margins. And it might just start to seem like you have a superpower at work.
What’s a hotelier to do?
Another decision?! Don’t worry, we’ve got you. A key tactic that can help hotel operators reduce decision fatigue is to stop relying on instinct or guesswork and start relying on data instead. And for that, you need technology that can parse through the many digital clues in your guest data to reveal the most profitable opportunities — AND act on them. You need a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
A hospitality CDP can pull together and analyze data in real-time from multiple customer touchpoints, not just your PMS. This includes data from your email communications, guest surveys, text messaging history, voice channel, and other systems like your spa, golf club, restaurants, and folio.
With this up-to-the-minute holistic view of each guest’s activities and their full history with your portfolio, you’re empowered to make faster, more accurate, and more confident decisions about how to maximize direct revenue opportunities and get the right guest into the right room, at the right price, through the right channel.
Layers of uncertainty
Identifying the right guests, tailoring messaging for the right segments, and anticipating the right price are key areas of uncertainty facing hoteliers every day. Even the most on-top-of-it revenue manager probably can’t tell you if a repeat guest has used different booking channels, what amenities they used on their last three visits, and what offers are most likely to tempt them to spend more. And that’s just one property, let alone across a portfolio.
Hoteliers have no shortage of guest data in their PMS, CRM, call center software, online reviews, surveys, and golf, spa, restaurant, folio systems and more — but it’s usually fragmented, inconsistent, or just hard to work with.
Think about it: How often have you struggled to identify repeat guests? They may have stayed at different properties in your portfolio, used various email addresses and nicknames, or booked through multiple different OTAs.
This lack of clarity not only impacts your ability to provide personalized guest experiences but also exacerbates your decision fatigue because it's unclear who you should target with your marketing efforts. You may know you have the right information somewhere, but without the right tools, it remains just out of reach. You end up shooting in the dark, potentially missing out on valuable opportunities to engage your most promising guests.
A hospitality CDP includes identity resolution, which uses advanced AI and machine learning algorithms to identify and unify guest profiles with a high degree of confidence, even if they booked via an OTA or used a nickname in the past. This creates a comprehensive view of each guest. And it makes it really easy to identify your VIPs. You can see their stay history, lifetime spend, preferences, and more in an arrivals report that is shared with the front desk agent when they are checking in — the works.
The right CDP platform also enables granular segmentation. It automatically updates segments in real-time, making it easy to spot commonalities between your guests and allowing you to target the perfect audience for each personalized marketing campaign. For example, if you had a segment for “ski season guests” with a specific range of stay dates, new guests who booked in that time frame would automatically be added to the segment.
This prevents you from sending campaigns to the wrong audiences, like promoting family-friendly activities to unmarried adventure seekers (and risk ending up in SPAM!). Or by neglecting to let your foodies know about a special guest chef visiting the property for the month of August. Segmentation holds the key to higher conversions. Our Hospitality Benchmark Report shows that you can generate 2.6x more revenue per email recipient when applying three segment filters. As a hotelier, you can decide on the filters that make the most sense for your particular marketing campaign. One example combination could be filters for the drive market, repeat guests, and guests with an NPS of 8 or higher.
A CDP can also help mitigate pricing uncertainty when integrated with a revenue management system. It remedies pricing strategy headaches by allowing you to implement dynamic pricing. This type of personalized pricing approach has become essential for hotels seeking to maximize revenue and enhance guest satisfaction.
The technology pulls in historic data on total customer spend — not just room revenue — and incorporates real-time market conditions to guide your rates. This integration can even optimize your upsell pricing strategies. For instance, you could send a pre-arrival email with an upgrade offer, where the software has already calculated the best rate for that specific guest at that exact moment.
With a hospitality CDP, you're not just guessing anymore — you're making data-driven decisions that will yield impactful results.
The status quo + an alternative
Let’s take a look at how all this works with a common scenario.
A large group reservation for 30 rooms — booked months ago — just canceled. It’s only two weeks out, and you’re suddenly staring at a big hole in your occupancy. Without a CDP, what's your typical playbook? It’s panic time, right?
You may rush to put together a last-minute promotion on the OTAs, sacrificing your profit margins. Or you might blast out a generic email to your entire database, hoping something sticks. It’s a lot of guesswork and crossed fingers. And while these strategies may bring in some bookings, they aren't always the most efficient or profitable. The uncertainty and urgency create a stressful situation (more decision fatigue, anyone?), highlighting the need for a more strategic approach.
Now — same scenario, different story. This time you have the help of a CDP. With a few clicks, you quickly identify the right feeder markets and guest segments to target. Maybe you spot an opportunity in your drive market. Or you identify a segment of business travelers who frequently book last-minute trips and have stayed with you during the same period last year.
With access to customizable templates, you can quickly whip up personalized campaigns. For your drive market, you may send out an email highlighting a special “Staycation” promotion or “Mid-Week Getaway” package, complete with late check-out and a dining credit. For your business travelers, you could send a text message about your convenient grab-and-go breakfast items and high-speed Wi-Fi.
The best part is that you're not scrambling to try and decide what to do, or slashing rates across the board. Instead, you're letting the data do the heavy lifting, empowering you to quickly target the right guests with the right offers, and maintaining your margins.
Put decision fatigue to bed
We all know that decision fatigue is real in our industry. Experts tell us the key to combating it is to make fewer decisions or delegate them. And that's exactly what a CDP does for you. It’s like having a reliable consultant available 24/7, one that leverages data to reduce the stress and uncertainty that comes with running a hotel.
But most importantly, a CDP drives results for your hotel. When you have the data at your fingertips, it’s like having a superpower at work. This superpower will help you:
- Delight guests by communicating on their preferred channels with personalized messaging
- Automate personalization throughout the guest journey
- Discover new revenue streams with upselling and cross-selling opportunities
- Increase your margins by driving more direct bookings
- Take back market share from OTAs
- Fill the right room with the right guests at the right price
When you’re making better, faster, and more informed decisions, you can focus on what really matters most — creating exceptional guest experiences. In the end, isn't that why you got into this business in the first place?
About Revinate
Revinate empowers hoteliers to directly connect with their guests.
Our Guest Data Platform and communication solutions unlock revenue for hoteliers and put them in control of the full guest experience — initial research, booking, check-in, throughout the stay, and even after check out — all via the communication channels that guests prefer, whether it's voice, text, email, or web.
More than 12,000 hotels globally bank on Revinate to drive direct revenue and deliver delightful guest experiences.
Ask us how we do it. Visit our website to get a demo.
Sanjana Chappalli
VP of Brand Marketing and Communications
Revinate, Inc.
