Are Asian hoteliers today overwhelmed by data? Is all of this data helpful?
Over recent years, Asian hoteliers have witnessed a huge influx of data delivered by online reviews, social media and the ever-increasing number of travel sites.
This is in addition to all internal data hotels have that can be analysed in any number of ways including by channel, market segment, source and room type.
Hoteliers unprecedented access to this level of data can help deliver the ideal guest, at the ideal time, for the ideal price. But not all data is created equal, and the sheer volume of it all can leave revenue managers feeling like they are drowning in a sea of data.
What role does analytics play in helping hoteliers make sense of all of their data?
In the age of big data, advanced analytics and real-time visibility of clean information is critical. Any hotelier working without the support of an analytical revenue management system will find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information and complexity of the data.
Advanced analytics, embedded in the latest revenue management systems, help hoteliers gain insights and capitalise on market trends to improve hotel profitability.
Today the common types of analytics that can help hoteliers make sense of their large data sets include:
- Descriptive Analytics and Diagnostic Analytics provide hoteliers with an analysis of historical revenue performance data to identify what happened, when it happened and why it happened. Large volumes of historical data are used in descriptive analytics to help hotels make informed decisions about the future based on previous results. Common examples of descriptive data include reservation booking data used in standard hotel reporting, such as business-on-the-books and pick-up reports. Diagnostic data aggregates historical data to help you understand why an outcome occurred, and helps benchmark hotel performance against market competition.
- Predictive Analytics provide revenue foresight by delivering forecasts that establish where your hotel can execute future pricing and inventory strategies. Most of today’s revenue management solutions provide this with occupancy and revenue forecasts at the total hotel level. These informed forecasts help you anticipate what’s going to happen next, where your revenue opportunities are, and where you can drive effective pricing and inventory controls.
- Prescriptive Analytics go one step further to give hotels revenue insight. They leverage hotel data and forward-looking market intelligence data to help identify who your hotel’s ideal guests are and how your hotel can achieve optimal revenue performance. This level of data analysis takes a hotel from forecasting to futurecasting. The powerful combination of industry data and revenue strategy controls deliver highly accurate pricing and inventory control decisions by market segment, room type and multiple lengths-of-stay. They also give hoteliers deeper levels of insight into market positioning, channel profitability and guest personas for more insightful marketing campaigns and promotions that can be monitored in real-time to maximise direct business and profitability.
