With an excellent speaker line-up the event turned out to be very fruitful for all attendees. Professionals from companies like Vincci Hotels, NH Hotels, InterContinental Madrid Hotel (IHG Group), RateTiger, Marketing Surfers/Buzzturistic, ITH, Hosteltur and Sol Meliá shared their knowledge and experience and gave fantastic presentations on their chosen subjects. My presentation focused on the importance of rate shopping, benchmarking and the future of hotel business intelligence.
Today’s paradigm in the hotel business is focused on price optimization where:
• Price is a function of demand and demand is a function of price, and
• Decisions should be based on demand, availability and relative competitor price positioning.
Apart from the current challenges of managing data and various systems, hoteliers are further facing the obstacle of silos throughout our companies. We only get to see a small piece of the big picture. The need is for, and in a few cases the trend is towards, a strategic integration of revenue management, marketing and guest analytics.
In a world where consumer segmentation is becoming difficult and distribution is becoming increasingly complex, how will hotel executives keep up? Through business intelligence!
Business intelligence is moving towards providing:
• Better industry benchmarks centered on profitability, not just revenue
• Market relevant price optimization tied to distribution strategy
• Behavioural economics and neuromarketing embedded into pricing and marketing decisions
• Integrated technology with CRS, RMS, PMS, POS, social media, loyalty and sales data all blended into one system and/or data source
Hence what we try to derive here is that – to achieve better benchmarking, optimized pricing and integrated behavioral economics, hoteliers need to focus on integrated technology systems.
Further the conference saw hoteliers discussing the growing trend of new positions coming into being – the likes of Community Manager, Channel Manager and Guest Experience Manager are making inroads into the organizational structure of companies.