What is Hotel Analytics and how it can help your hotel
Hotel analytics helps hotels analyze and explore data from many sources (internal & external data) and discover patterns, trends, ‘hidden’ relationships between hotel KPIs, and get useful insights that will help hotel decision makers make fast, timely and proactive decisions to improve the performance of their hotel.
Hotel analytics and hotel reporting are both very useful but serve different purposes.
Hotel reporting is about organizing a predefined set of hotel data that meets certain criteria in a preset format. As such it shows you specifically what you have requested and is therefore fairly static at the time of the report generation.
Hotel analytics (and analytics in general) is about exploring your hotel data, finding answers to your business questions (for example what affects your hotel performance and also why) and getting insights that will help you make fast data-driven decisions to increase your hotel’s performance. Hotel analytics dashboards are interactive and thus dynamic in nature. This means that you can steer the presentation of your data analysis in the angle that you want in real-time.
Let's take Hotellisense hotel analytics platform for example:
Hotellisense is a SaaS cloud hotel analytics software application built on top of technologically advanced business intelligence tools. It integrates and collects data from key hotel systems such as your hotel PMS, hotel POS, hotel ERP, and hotel Payroll, combines, organizes and analyzes this data and presents them in a form that allows hoteliers to dynamically perform hotel data analytics.
More specifically this combinational hotel data analysis is presented on dozens of prebuilt interactive visual dashboards (such as tables, graphs, heatmaps, pie charts, world maps etc.), specifically designed for hotels so that hoteliers can dynamically do hotel data analytics in real-time by clicking on these ‘out of the box’, prebuilt hotel-ready dashboards to dynamically select filters.
In this way they can explore their hotel data and discover patterns, trends, ‘hidden’ relationships between hotel KPIs, and useful insights that will help them make fast, timely and proactive decisions.
No technical skills are required.
Business Intelligence tools are types of software that collect data from many data sources (internal and/or external) and bring them in a form (e.g. dashboards) that enables fast and real-time data analysis.
In the case of hotels these data sources could, for example, be the key hotel systems (internal) and flight demand data (external data source).
Going back to the Hotellisense example, by clicking on the prebuilt hotel dashboards you can drill down your analysis into great detail and explore hotel data to find answers to your hotel business questions as they come up, exactly at the moment they come up, get fast insights and make fast and informed decisions.
Analyzing your data in this way you can discover not only what is wrong (for example why your performance this quarter is lower than last year’s or vs your yearly budget) but also why it is wrong (is it a particular month’s performance, the performance of a Travel Agent or a specific guest nationality?). Having these insights fast you can easily and quickly take timely, data-driven decisions on where to focus and what to do to fix this.
Hotel analytics can help hoteliers to improve hotel guest experience, build better marketing campaigns, boost hotel revenue, control hotel costs, plan operations more efficiently to maximize profit and many more.
For more information you can check the links below:
Hotel analytics offer faster decision-making, better productivity, lower costs, and help hoteliers improve hotel performance (revenue, occupancy, costs etc.), in other words it helps the hotel to be more efficient and more competitive.
Going back to the Hotellisense example, Hotellisense is like a central hub of information for a hotel. Hoteliers have in one screen up to date information about hotel revenue, reservations, hotel outlets, hotel costs, hotel gross profit, hotel key operations metrics and hotel payroll (just to name a few), which they can further analyze in real-time to help them make targeted and informed decisions to improve their hotel’s performance and competitive advantage.
The volume of data (both internal and external) is growing at an incredible pace.
Take for example the data from internal data sources such as hotel PMS, hotel POS, hotel ERP, hotel Payroll.
Analysis of this data can provide a lot of information such as:
What’s driving hotel performance and why?
What hotel guests want and when?
How effectively and profitably does my hotel generate revenue?
How can I plan operations more effectively depending on revenue outlook?
This information can help hotel decision-makers take data-driven decisions to achieve their goals. For example:
bring more guests to their hotel
make their stay more memorable and
be more profitable and stay competitive
To do this hotels have to analyze their hotel data fast and efficiently.
But in many hotels this is not the case.
Although data is gold, it may be one of the most underutilized assets of a hotel.
This happens because in many cases hotels may spend hours or even days manually collecting, combining and organizing the data from their key hotel systems and then use traditional tools (e.g. spreadsheets) to analyze it.
This is a rather static, manual and repetitive process as it involves a lot of digging through hotel data, report by report and system by system that not only limits the depth and speed of analysis but also the ability to plan ahead and act fast and proactively.
On top of that it costs time and money that harms the productivity, efficiency, and the competitive advantage of your hotel.
So what’s the solution?
The right tools such as hotel analytics tools/platforms.
Such hotel software applications helps you to instantly transform the data in your hotel systems into useful insights and actions such as:
Understand hotel guests’ behavior (per nationality or room type etc.) and make offers they are more likely to respond to so your hotel can earn extra revenue and delight guests
Run more targeted hotel marketing campaigns. For example run a marketing campaign to secure more direct bookings and maximize your marketing budget ROI
Find the most profitable tour operators or online travel agents (or booking sources in general) so you can negotiate better with them
Clean up the product range of your hotel outlets
Organize your purchases
Control your hotel costs and plan operations more efficiently
These are just a few ideas. The number of ideas/business questions is limited only by imagination.
This kind of hotel business intelligence can help you make fast and timely decisions to improve revenue, profitability, occupancy, make your hotel guests’ experience more special and many more.
As we mentioned above, Hotellisense hotel analytics platform has dozens of prebuilt hotel dashboards which are organized in modules.
These modules are:
Hotel Revenue Analytics – Multi-dimensional analysis of your hotel's revenue (hotel rooms and F&B) so you can find where your hotel revenue comes from at a glance.
Hotel Reservations Analytics - Hotel PMS reservation data analysis with a few clicks. Find your hotel room reservations pick up, booking positioning or booking pace statistics for any date or period and know your hotel’s performance in seconds.
Hotel POS Analytics – Data analysis from all your hotel POS systems in one screen. Make offers that will delight your hotel guests, streamline your outlet operations and many more.
Hotel Reporting Dashboards – Dynamically create multidimensional reports for your hotel or hotel group in seconds.
Hotel Budgeting - Budgeting made easy. Set policies and finalize next year’s budget in great detail (per day and per room) with a click.
Hotel Revenue, Gross Profit, Expenses, Operational Metrics Dashboards – Fast insights for hotel revenue, expenses and profits to see how effectively and profitably your hotel is generating revenue
Hotel Payroll - Fast insights of your hotel’s payroll so that you can plan your operations more efficiently and maximize profit.
Our team here at Hotellisense has a combination of skills and experience to help hotels of any size or type make smarter and more profitable decisions and excel in their markets by making the best use of one their most valuable assets :
Their hotel data!
We constantly introduce new features and modules making sure our hotel analytics platform is always up to the task…
…but we also implement custom requirements that our customers might need.
Interested to know more?
Give us a call, drop a line or book a Live Demo where we can discuss and show you how our hotel analytics platform can help you and your hotel like many others until today.