We have already talked about the importance of data analysis in the hotel sector, a fundamental tool for hotel data management and how a data-driven approach allows companies in the sector to improve the performance of the main areas: Marketing, Finance and Sales.
The accommodation facilities have clear key elements to invest on: improve the customer experience, optimize internal operations such as the management of human resources, reservations and rates, but also obtain a timely forecast of demand and competition. All elements that allow hospitality companies to gain a great competitive advantage to emerge and conquer new market shares.
In this context it is essential to talk about Big Data and, specifically, Advanced Analytics for the hospitality industry.
Advanced Analytics for Hotels: what they are
“Advanced Analytics” for hotel refer to the application of advanced analysis techniques and artificial intelligence tools to extract significant information from data collected within a hotel in order to improve strategic, operational and marketing decisions.
Advanced Analytics goes beyond basic analytics and includes sophisticated methods such as machine learning (machine learning), predictive analytics and text analysis. These techniques allow hotels to discover patterns, trends, and correlations hidden in data that might be otherwise difficult to spot.
Advantages and opportunities of Advanced Analytics for hospitality
In short, Advanced Analytics provide hotels with a greater capacity for analysis and forecasting on multiple aspects of management and operations, essential elements for making more informed decisions at any level.
Demand forecasting
Advanced Analytics allow you to analyze booking history, local events, demographics, and other factors to better predict future demand. This allows accommodations to optimize rates, allocate resources, and plan capacity to maximize performance.
Tariff optimisation
Using booking data, advanced analytics can suggest dynamic pricing strategies that are customized in real time for different customer segments and times of the year, finally enabling competitive pricing, maximising employment and increasing overall turnover (revenue management).
Management of reviews and feedback
With Advanced Analytics, hotels can finally analyze guest reviews and feedback automatically. Through natural language analysis and Text Mining techniques, they can identify feelings expressed in reviews (sentiment analysis), common keywords and recurring themes. The qualitative data are thus transformed into actionable-data, immediately usable to improve the management of reviews, the online reputation of individual structures, the brand and the overall quality of the services offered.
Personalization of the customer experience
By analyzing customer preference data, Advanced Analytics enables hotels to deliver a personalized experience. They may suggest personalized recommendations for additional services, room selection, restaurants or activities based on previous guest behavior and preferences.
Management of resources and operational efficiency
Advanced analysis can help individual accommodation facilities (as well as more complex organizations) optimize the use of resources such as personnel, supplies and energy. By analyzing operational data, such as personnel presence, room cleaning times and energy consumption, you can identify inefficiencies and make improvements to reduce operating costs and improve overall efficiency. We talked about it in detail with reference to IoT for the Hotellerie sector.
Advanced Analytics Programs for Hotels
Although there are many Advanced Analytics programs for the hospitality industry, custom solutions are those that allow you to respond in a timely manner to the specific needs of various organizations, integrating various software and IT infrastructure:
- Data Warehousee and/or Data Lake for centralized data management;
- Business Intelligence & Advanced Analytics for implementation of algorithms, predictive analytics systems, machine learning systems and AI;
- Data Visualization software (e.g. Qlik, Power BI) for the creation of comprehensive and intuitive self analysis Dashboards.
How to choose Advanced Analysis software
The choice of the best program depends on the specific needs of the accommodation, the size of the organization, the budget and the internal skills. Before selecting an advanced analytics program, it is advisable to conduct a business needs assessmentand compare the features and functionalities offered by the different solutions (Product Benchmark).
Among the features of a good Advanced Analytics program, there are some that are essential:
- Integration of predictive models, indispensable for optimal planning of room availability and resource allocation (e.g. the use of Advanced Analysis for forecasting new market trends, for the hospitality, travel and tourism sectors).
- Dynamic management of prices and rates, considering factors such as demand, competition, seasonality and other relevant parameters to maximize revenues.
- Analysis tools for customer segmentation based on demographic characteristics, preferences, booking behaviour and other related data.
- Comparative analysis of the performance of competing hotels.
- Sentiment Analysis tools: analysis of reviews and customer feedback, useful to improve the guest experience.
- Customizable dashboard and report for a clear and concise view of data and metrics relevant to hotel management, from staff programming to supply management, preventive maintenance, customer data, etc.
- Data integration of different systems and data sources used by hotels, such as booking management systems, online booking engines, OTAs, guest management systems and other internal and external data sources.
- Security of corporate data and guests, in accordance with privacy regulations.
- Ease of use, technical support and continuous software updates.
BBI for Hospitality is the ready-to-market Business Intelligence solution which includes all the features of Advanced Analytics and Data Visualization to integrate with existing management systems and get valuable insights through immediate navigation dashboard reading and quick interpretation.
