What is Hotel Business Intelligence? 

According to Gartner, “Analytics and business intelligence (ABI) is an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance.”

Hotel business intelligence is a subset of ABI that focuses on collecting, analyzing, and using information about hotel operations with artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize revenue and operations across the entire supply chain.

This information can come from various sources, including guest surveys, online review sites, registration logs, reservation systems, and financial records.

Using advanced data analytics tools, machine learning, and algorithms, hotel business intelligence professionals can glean valuable insights into hotel operations, including service quality, pricing strategies, staffing needs, marketing effectiveness, and more.

By leveraging these insights effectively, hotels can improve efficiency and performance across their operations. Ultimately, this helps them provide better service to their guests and other stakeholders, such as investors.

In this post, we’ll discuss the benefits of BI applications and key features to look for, along with some use cases.

The Benefits of Business Intelligence Solutions

Hotels operate 24/7, which makes relying on business analytics paramount to success. Sticking with manual data management and data analysis with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets slows down your decision-making, which allows competitors to get an advantage.

BI software offers a variety of benefits to hotels, including the ability to:

• Collect and maintain multiple data sets, with automatic data mining, so you don’t have to compile everything yourself.
• Analyze properties and compare them to the competition
• Forecast busy seasons with predictive analytics, based on past occupancy data
• Track all hotels and performance in a single platform, using the most relevant KPIs and metrics based on your business goals and strategy
• Integrate with your property management system (PMS) and revenue management system (RMS) for better visibility into your data and performance. The more data integration you have, the better equipped you’ll be to make decisions.
• Find and adjust pricing strategies if and when you spot under-performing properties
• Improve revenue across all channels with your higher-rated segments.
• Use advanced analytics to develop more profitable revenue strategies with data-driven forecasting.
• Confidently attract a profitable business mix for a steady stream of customers and revenue.
• Move beyond a standard customer relationship management (CRM) software that keeps track of your guest history to get more valuable information about your customer base and operations.

Classify Customers

In hospitality, making every customer feel special is crucial, which means meeting various needs. Using BI, you can classify or segment guests based on past behavior, demographics, and geography metrics. The information comes from website bookings, your CRM, and point-of-sale purchases. It may also come from customer loyalty programs, feedback surveys, and other data sources.

Manage Revenue

Revenue management comes down to supply and demand at the most basic level. Using that information, you can determine the ideal room rate.

Revenue management focuses on several KPIs such as average daily rate (ADR), revenue per room (RevPar), and total revenue per available room (TRevPar).

Demand forecasting uses historical data in your BI apps to estimate future demand, empowering you to make better business decisions.

Key Features of Hotel Business Intelligence Solutions

When looking for hotel business intelligence solutions, look for BI tools that have these features:

Visual Comparison

It can be hard to interpret and gain actionable insights if you’ve got multiple data sources. You can easily compare your properties to the competition with data visualization tools.

With graphs, charts, and other visualization, it’s much easier to understand all the big data your hotel collects, so you can make better decisions about where to go next.

Many tools also include interactive features that allow you to further customize your data and user experience on the analytics platform.

Overview of All Properties

Managing multiple hotel properties makes it difficult to keep up with what’s happening with each location. Business intelligence software provides an overview of all properties in one report. Not only does this save time, but makes it easy to spot issues with properties that need your attention immediately.

Hoteliers can analyze all their properties in one convenient platform. With cloud-based business intelligence systems, users can access their data anywhere, anytime, on any device, including mobile devices. The dashboard’s user interface is straightforward and easy to use. In addition, business managers can easily drill down to see each hotel’s key details and identify weak performers.

Automation Capabilities

Business intelligence platforms and analytics solutions have built-in automation tools for data analysis. These tools automatically analyze your data and give it to you in a format that’s easy to understand.

Once you’ve connected all your data sources to your platform and done some data preparation, you’ll be able to automate reporting for a self-service BI option.

Using automation, you can save time and focus on what really matters. With rules and logic to create alerts (such as when a hotel is underbooked, overbooked, or the competition has adjusted pricing), you can more easily adjust your strategy.

Adequately understanding market changes is a must to create the ideal hotel pricing strategy. This involves understanding guest expectations, needs, and demographics.

Let’s say, for example, you notice more business travelers looking for single rooms in the summer and families looking for suites or adjoining rooms in the winter.

With machine learning and BI data, you can automate dynamic pricing and rate changes that save time and keep you competitive.

Real-Time Notifications

Data is great, but if you don’t know about changes as they happen, you can’t act appropriately. When a system provides real-time notifications, you can take advantage of those time-sensitive situations to get a competitive edge.

Insights on Future Demand

Collecting occupancy rate data from your PMS enables you to analyze influencing factors and predict future occupancy (and, therefore, staffing needs) based on the likelihood of those factors happening again.

Occupancy rate is often the primary metric that hoteliers monitor. It’s what shows the percentage of rooms being used over a particular period.

Market conditions are always changing because of many variables. Demand waxes and wanes quickly from fuel prices to the holiday season, local events, and pandemic worries, among other things.

Real-time data insights from your modern BI solution allow you to adequately plan for influxes of bookings based on data insights. This data helps managers make key decisions, such as adjusting promotions and rates and planning for low periods.

This insight can also help them adjust their staff allocation and resourcing. As a result, hotel managers can be more effective in maximizing revenue.

Receive Revenue Management Solutions with Prosper Hotels

The right BI solution makes all the difference in your ability to make solid business decisions. But not all business intelligence tools are created equally. To be successful, you need a tool focused solely on hotel management from a reputable provider that understands the industry.

Traditional Hotel BI Solutions provide insightful information but do not follow through to implementation. With Prosper, we collect insight, implement the changes, measure the effectiveness, and promote the results. This becomes a virtuous cycle, making your BI solution much more powerful.

With Prosper, you’ll get everything you need to manage business performance at your hotel, whether you’ve got one or 50 locations to manage. 

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you make the most of your BI platform.