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Why hotels can’t afford to ignore business intelligence in 2015- Part 2

Why BI can do what current tools don’t ?
The current kind of retrospective – your rate shopping or production data analysis is no longer adequate to ensure the best business decisions. Yes, you can see your competitor set’s rate movement in your rate shopping report, but at a time when competition is cut-throat, you need to be always prepared for sudden increase / decrease in demand. An advanced business intelligence like RateTiger Analytics gives you high quality market insights for your revenue strategy to respond to opportunities and threats in real time for optimizing business outcome. Benchmark your competitors on key parameters to make informed pricing decisions. Plan and forecast with greater precision with historical and future data analysis.

Quality data is essential for producing accurate forecasts. Production Reports, which comes with booking pace, reservation and budget gap analysis, provides revenue managers with booking demands from all sources of online distribution broken down into market segment. Compare demand and booking pace to identify whether your sales strategy should be in promotional or allocation mode. Analyze forecasted revenue and occupancy and compare the forecasts to the same time last year. By analyzing the performance metrics, they can get a clear understanding of what makes travelers to book the property. Which channel delivers the most booking? Which OTA provides the highest RevPAR? And which delivers the most advanced bookings? What type of package are people buying here? This helps hotels identify their most valuable guests, their demography and the channel they are using for booking, and adapt strategies accordingly to maximize revenue.

Whether it is using analytics to predict customer behaviour, set pricing strategy, optimize ad spending or manage risk, analytics is moving to the top of the management agenda.
To progress on their analytics journey, hoteliers will need to focus on ways to generate insights from their technology investments, connect the insights to the relevant processes, and then link them to tangible business outcomes. Those, who implement business intelligence as an ancillary activity to a routine and integral part of doing business will make it to the finishing line faster than others.
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Why hotels can’t afford to ignore business intelligence in 2015- Part 1

There are two types business organizations today – one who rely on incorporate business intelligence in their decision making process and another who still relies on ‘gut’ feeling. At a time when we live in a perpetual state of hyper-competition, organizations which are using business intelligence to get key insights are responding more quickly to correct things that may be problematic.

Business analysts predict that bad data or poor data quality costs US businesses $600 billion annually. According to Gartner, poor data quality is a primary reason for 40% of all business initiatives failing to achieve their targeted benefits. With advanced analytics, they can improve their revenue by 10 – 20%.

Wikipediadefines Business Intelligence as the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. BI makes easy interpretation of large volumes of data which helps businesses identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights. Sharlock Holmes has summed it up long time back, “Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay”. BI does exactly that – builds insights by placing data at the right place.

Internet has been a great leveler in narrowing the information gap. Today’s customers are empowered with ample sources to get information on almost everything they want to know, social media for peer feedback and mobile connectivity to stay up to date even on the go. To say that we at hospitality industry are finding it challenging to cope up with changing guest behavior would be an understatement. British Airways paid a heavy price when a disgruntled customer bought promoted tweet to complain about their customer service, which became global news. In recent times United Airlines and Air India had to face lot of flak when videos on their customer service went viral in social media.

This constant scrutiny has forced us in the hospitality industry to continuously adjust and refine our marketing strategies. Let’s face it – we are dealing with the multifaceted traveler whose preference changes depending on type of trips. He might not need high-speed internet during his family vacation, but for his business trip that’s an absolute necessity. The way people plan trips is also changing.

Google, which has done a detailed study on consumer’s purchase path, has identified how different marketing channels such as email, social media, display ads, direct search, referrals, paid and organic search add different values to the customer at different stages. Some channels will act more as an assisting interaction, i.e. by building brand awareness – these are the channels which make a customer consider a brand while others will act further downstream, when the customer’s decision and transaction, is made. For hotels it has become imperative to understand guest buying behaviors, price elasticity and changing market dynamics for yielding the optimum rate from the most desired consumer set.

Organizations need to capture information at every stage and correctly analyze it to get the right strategy in place. However this is easier said, that done. In this era of information explosion, hoteliers are overloaded with data, but not enough understanding to map them to business needs. Clearly the problem has shifted to making sense of the data which is far more complicated than gathering information.


This is where business intelligence comes in. Data becomes valuable only after it is shaped into insights, and when those insights inform the key decision processes that lead to better outcomes. We at eRevMax, view business intelligence as something much more than a technology with an ROI; it’s a transformational phenomenon that will fundamentally change how business will be conducted and decisions made. 
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What is Revenue Management?

Revenue management is a term that’s often thrown around the hotel industry, but what is it, exactly? Some believe that revenue management is all about ensuring a capacity of 80 percent or more at any given time, regardless of what it takes, but does this really equal good revenue management? Perhaps not. Instead, revenue management is about understanding past trends, having a good overview of the current market, sensibly forecasting the future, and addressing rates based upon these aspects combined. It’s about knowing what people are willing to pay, rather than what they want to pay, and not succumbing to cheaper rates for fear of not meeting targets. Overall, revenue management could be described as ‘the art of turning business away’.

Read full story here

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Newshound: Trends and Reports – Hotel Online Distribution


GHOTEL hotel & living selects RateTiger for smart online room distribution

German hospitality group GHOTEL hotel & living has selected RateTiger’s industry leading Channel Manager to maximise its distribution reach for its unique accommodation offerings by updating distribution channels efficiently in real-time.
http://www.eglobaltravelmedia.com.au/z-more/technology-more/ghotel-hotel-living-selects-ratetiger-for-smart-online-room-distribution.html

The Future of Hotel Marketing: Social Media Synopsis
Hotel chains that are open to 24/7 online social communications with their fan base can sense the power of a free flowing exchange of ideas, and capitalize on a low-cost marketing channel solution. Communication with customer base via social media channels is now expected as standard, whether these platforms are utilized to shape brand image, facilitate user-generated content or compliment a targeted pay-per-click campaign, social media is vital to the success of a hotel property.
http://hotelexecutive.com/business_review/3441/the-future-of-hotel-marketing-social-media-synopsis

Data transformation key for revenue managers

As more data becomes available, revenue managers must be able to filter and make sense of only the best information in order to achieve their goals, sources said during a Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) webinar. “Some people may say that we’re drowning in data, but I think it’s more accurate to say that we’re drowning in information,” said Kevin Coleman, partner and COO at Intelligent Hospitality, a hotel business intelligence company that provides reporting and analytics for hotel sales, marketing and revenue management.
http://www.hotelnewsnow.com/Articles.aspx/10263/Data-transformation-key-for-revenue-managers

A Call to Arms: How to Shift Market Share from the OTAs to the Hotel Website

 
This year, the hospitality industry is in for a lot of pain. OTA dependency continues to plague the hospitality industry, despite gains in the past three years and positive trends in all three industry indicators. This isn’t new. What’s new is the pain to the bottom line inflicted by the fat commission checks hoteliers are now paying Expedia and other OTAs, due to the widespread adoption of Expedia”s and Booking.com”s agency model in the U.S.
http://www.hospitalitynet.org/column/global/154000392/4060290.html