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Data Snaps - Budget season thinking points

October 4, 2019
Nikita Matharu

As each day passes, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created. With so much data being generated in the world, it’s a no-brainer that there’s a magnitude of talking points. This week’s interest in data comes from 3 main areas of hospitality: job landscape and how this is ever-changing, intelligent analytics making its way to budget season and lastly, how AI is revolutionizing the operations of Destination Marketing Organizations. Let’s sink our teeth into how these areas are impacting our industry.

The emergence of Revenue Manage System (RMS) startups permits an even playing field between small chains and independent hotels to big chains as it promotes awareness of the practices such as pricing, competitors, occupancy, channel rates on a regular basis, by strategically offering the system at an affordable price. This allows revenue management to be widely accessible to hotel groups at all levels. RMS startups have realized that their systems not only needs to be accessible but it must be simple and user-friendly as most small chains and independent hotels do not have many designated revenue management personnel. Therefore, RMS startups have re-strategized to make their systems simplified and intuitive, promoting the shift from human decision-making to machine decision-making through smart algorithms as mentioned in this article. The days of excel based systems to revenue manage are slowly coming to an end. In order for this science to be more reliable than gut-feeling, it needs seamless integrations with PMS, constant data flow for real-time support and actionable insights which can be achieved through open architecture and marketplaces

With the growing importance of data, it’s predicted that hotels will need to make space in their organizations for Data Managers. As each minute passes, the gathering of data becomes more immense. When data is not utilised, essential insights are missed, especially about your guests! Churning data into actionable insights and guest knowledge should be a high priority of hoteliers. At each touch point, data is created, permitting a magnitude of customer knowledge which enables hoteliers to anticipate guests needs without the guest saying so. This article states that soon a Data Manager will be of the same significance, if not greater significance, as the Revenue Manager.

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As the days come shorter, the leaves begin to fall and the temperature drops, Autumn has arrived which means that Budget season is coming into play. Hoteliers must look for ways to keep their hotels up-float and profitable. One way to do this is to invest in technologies that keep track of your hotel, embraces data from all angles and allows hoteliers to make dynamic decisions. When seeking technology, a key area to look into implementing and using Business Intelligence (BI) optimized software as mentioned in this article. It's nearly impossible for businesses to succeed in today's current climate without some form of business analytics. Going the extra step beyond BI, Intelligent Analytics allows users to make data-driven decisions based on analysis and data visualization to better understand a business's strategy and success.

While most data platforms and solutions provide analysis on hotel performance based on stored data, many tools are still unable to produce intelligent analytics that allows for further improvements. Intelligent analytics includes prediction and recommendation functions, whereas standard analytics is more descriptive and based on limited data sources. By introducing more future-forward technology platforms to a hotel's existing data strategy, hotels have even more options and opportunities for improved results and bigger market shares in competitor sets. To delve further in understanding what makes hotel analytics intelligent, you can read our full article here.

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Is AI becoming the backbone of Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) tasks? With sleek AI solutions being used in most industries, DMO should be no exception. I’m not speaking about the standard use of Chatbots. I’m speaking about the more sophisticated ways AI can be utilized to relieve marketers from low-value, time-consuming tasks, allowing time and space for the more creative tasks that drive results.

Personalization is a vital area that can be revolutionized by AI. Connecting travelers with experiences and destinations to suit their needs on a large scale is only achievable with AI. Successfully targeting customers with personalized content leads to a high conversion rate but the question still remains, how can I implement this? The first important step that needs to be made is identifying which tasks can be automated by evaluating which low-value tasks take up the most time. This article depicts the following steps from moving from manual tasks to automation. Furthermore, many believe that DMO has a strength that the liked of Google nor Amazon can compete with, they have genuine and authentic answers from local people with in-tune knowledge. A local flavor is something that tech giants will struggle to attain claims this article. Working together with AI technological can give DMO the additional boost that’s needed to compete. For example, Visit Greenwich is exploring the option of letting travelers digitalize themselves and virtually explore Greenwich as whichever character they desire. They could walk by the River Thames as a Knight or stroll through Greenwich Market as a hobbit.  It allows the destination to be shown and accessed in multiple ways enticing a variety of markets.