Prepping up the Hospitality Industry with Big Data

Organizations are really on their feet to provide the unforgettable or never-seen-before customer experience. Improving the customer lifetime value needs to be understood – and that is possible today when organizations choose to be data-driven and eventually make better decisions. Organizations need to dare to use the unstructured data – as it makes a big percentage of big data – to their advantage.

The hospitality industry is huge and they, above all other industries, are expected to provide the ideal customer experience. Leveraging big data to their advantage by studying customers is what can boost their experience. Every reservation requires and creates a lot of data – like the channel of reservation, location, preferences of the guests, etc. Helpful Hint # 1: What a brand can do is to use more and more variables – like information about all hotels, guests, competitors and other internal and external data – coming in from various sources and the big data analytics will open new doors of experience.
Those in the hospitality industry that woo their clients employ the loyalty program to create a better experience for guests. Quite a lot of data rides on the loyalty program, with integrations from airlines, transportation and tourism industries. An awesome rewards program doesn’t just hand money back to the loyal guests, but instead knows its customers well enough to facilitate the appropriate purchasing behavior and improve overall experience. Helpful Hint # 2: Streamline data from all programs running to create a real-time accessible system, operable in multiple languages.

Helpful Hint #3: An SOA to ensure easy integration with the current business processes and making it scalable and flexible for future needs. Wouldn’t it be great to personalize each guest’s web experience – driving growth right from the reservation and up? The hotel industry can get the real, valuable insights into the high performing hotels of a particular area, and use robust analytics to analyze and better decisions – and eventually conquer the area!
Moving further, the industry could use predictive analysis to understand the minor areas within the major areas to know the common interests and then rule from there! Helpful Hint # 4: A real-time pricing data model, along with the customer profile could predict to customer’s relevance.
The enterprise view of data is giving the leaders an edge over others. The Service-oriented data –driven organizations like Expedia and InterContinental Hotel Group are the perfect example of driving better customer experience using big data and analytics. Expedia has proved to be a pioneer in offering online hotel, plane and car reservations — exemplifying the definition of a modern-day, data-driven organization and IHG has proved to be the top of the line by being an information-centric organization. We have a lot to learn, and we’re not short of ideals.