The world is on a mission to go green and the hotel industry is joining the movement. Starting with removing plastic straws from their properties, major hotel chains including Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt, and AccorHotels are trying to reduce the amount of plastic being used to help preserve our earth. Reducing waste is crucial to helping the environment and going green as reducing data waste is integral to enhancing a hotel’s performance and improving its business.
With hotel data, it’s the same. Hotels are wasting valuable data without even knowing it and they need to start “going green” in regards to saving their business environments. By wasting data, hotels are losing major opportunities and revenue generating potentials.
How hotels waste data
As mentioned in our previous article, “The Data Journey in a Hotel,” data is generated and collected by all team members in a hotel from the concierge to the general manager. With data generation and collection points occurring throughout all hours of the day, there is a lot of potential data to gather, convert, and use to benefit your hotel. Without proper recognition of these data points, to no surprise, data can go to waste. However, it takes much more than simply acknowledging the presence of data to prevent losing valuable revenue sources.
Businesses primarily lose data when they do not have the proper technology to collect and analyze the data. Without investing in technology solutions to better understand your hotel’s data, it is nearly impossible to comprehend the information, let alone gain results from it. According to the MIT Sloan Management Review, many businesses still struggle to understand the relationship between IT investments and business value. If your hotel business cannot see the great potential its data can bring, of course it will be difficult to convince decision makers to invest in better technologies.
However, thanks to the growing awareness of data’s value, businesses, hotels included, are beginning to see the true value of data and the potential return on investments in technology. While hotels are beginning to understand the importance of technology solutions and hotel data platforms, these software and applications cannot be of use to a hotel if its people do not understand how to use them or the solutions they are producing.
