Analytics in Hospitality: Driving Actionable Insights

In this section, we evaluate how adopting advanced analytics in hospitality industry helps drive greater customer and market understanding, leading to innovative brands, better customer targeting, improved pricing, and higher growth in both revenue and profits. Now is the time to develop an enterprise analytics capability that matures over time to become part of the business operations.

Know how analytics can help hotels reduce guesswork and gain actionable insights [PDF, 382 KB].

Over the past few years, hoteliers have been investing in reporting and business intelligence technology solutions to improve decision making. More recently, a number of lodging companies have taken strategic initiatives for a more integrated use of data across the enterprise. However, few companies have developed the analytical capability to manage the huge amount of information available.

An enterprise analytics capability—where analytics is a consistent part of doing business—provides the companies with the right hospitality industry statistics to gain greater understanding of customers and markets.

The proliferation of data and powerful computing technologies to crunch the data are propelling analytics to a prominent role in business. Data becomes valuable only after it’s shaped into insights, and when those insights help in the key decision processes and translate to better outcomes.

Using analytics in hospitality is more than a technology capability with a return on investment. It’s a transformational phenomenon that provides the right hotel market analysis and will fundamentally change how businesses are conducted and decisions are taken.

Leveraging analytics in hospitality industry can help hoteliers use the captured data to go beyond traditional loyalty programs and deepen their knowledge of guests. It helps develop a granular understanding of segment behavior, needs and expectations; identify profitable customer segments and buying preferences; and recognize opportunities to attract new guests.

Accenture recommends hoteliers to simplify their approach by focusing on the use of analytics in three key areas:

• Examine the decision factors that attract a specific customer type to a hotel—enabling hoteliers to better develop targeted offers.

• Leverage past purchase behavior and preferences to present appealing offers once guests are on their property (this includes gathering third-party external data points, such as TripAdvisor).

• Capture and evaluate property data to identify areas of operational improvement.

Analytics can also be used to further leverage the social media channel. Successful hoteliers take analytics a step further to seek in-depth hotel market analysis and use guest insights to:

• Customize interactions across channels (digital and mobile).
• Enable new services and products to provide a differentiated experience.