For many hotels, data management involves a mountain of spreadsheets, which leads to inconsistent reporting across teams and properties. Modern property management systems (PMS), channel managers and revenue systems generate vast amounts of information, but this valuable data often remains siloed.
NB: This is an article from SiteMinder, one of our Expert Partners
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Hotel business intelligence bridges this gap by automatically pulling these disparate data streams together, allowing owners and operators to trade the manual handling of CSV files for real-time visibility into the hotel’s performance, and transforming raw numbers into clear insights.
Rather than waiting for end-of-month reports that are already outdated by the time they hit your desk, hotel BI provides a real-time pulse check. This level of visibility is now critical for hotels that face growing competition and ever-shifting market conditions.
Why do hotels need a business intelligence solution?
A hotel business intelligence solution is essential for moving beyond the limitations of manual reporting and siloed property data. Humans simply aren’t efficient or effective at crunching data, but technology is. Hotel BI provides the visibility required to standardise KPIs across your hotel or property portfolio, to ensure every team or site is working from the same playbook, and that you consistently improve efficiency and capture more revenue.
Modern hotels don’t suffer from a lack of data – if anything, the opposite is true, and the issue is how to manage it all. Relying on your team to manually export reports from a PMS or channel manager into a spreadsheet is a recipe for human error and also results in delayed insights.
Business intelligence also solves the problem of data inconsistencies across hotel chains. In multi-site businesses, property managers often track performance differently to one another. Without a standardised approach, it can be impossible to get a genuine and valuable comparison of their performance.
How does hotel business intelligence improve decision-making for hotel owners?
Hotel BI transforms decision-making from a game of guesswork and gut feel into an exercise defined by precision and confidence. By centralising all the relevant performance metrics, you can identify where you’re leaking revenue and where your most compelling opportunities lie. You can also do all of this in real time, and with total confidence that you’re leaning on accurate information.
The numbers reinforce why this shift matters:
- Highly data-driven organisations are 3× more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making.
- Companies in the top quartile for data adoption are 6% more profitable than their less informed competitors (increasing to 9% if this adoption is sustained for five years).
- Hospitality groups that transitioned to data-driven pricing engines from traditional methods saw a 22% increase in RevPAR.
- Benchmark against competitors
You can’t win a race if you don’t know where your competitors are. Hotel business intelligence software allows you to monitor the rates and availability of hand-selected competitors, and can do so across multiple markets and regions. This visibility prevents you from being underpriced during peak demand or overpriced when the market dips – you can stay one step ahead of your local comp set, and say goodbye to decisions based on old data or gut feel.
