Your favorite drink ready and waiting as you arrive, your room lit just the way you like it and the pillow is exactly the type you prefer …
A utopian dream? Actually, pretty much reality, thanks to Business Intelligence, a feature of the cloud-based hotel management platform hetras. And one of the first hotels to use hetras’ Business Intelligence, the hotel chain Qbic, is already impressed with its effects.
Hotels are increasingly striving to make hotel stays more of a personal experience. This goes far beyond personally welcoming guests. "Business Intelligence allows hoteliers to identify guest-specific behaviors and preferences and to prepare accordingly for guests' arrival", explained Philip von Ditfurth, one of hetras' three managing directors. Historic guest data can be a valuable resource for ho-teliers and provide information on which of a hotel's guest return and how to best cater to their preferences and needs.
The advantage of a cloud-based multi-property system like hetras is that this data can be accessed 24/7 because it is stored on a central database. This means that this kind of data can also be quite easily analyzed using more complex criteria and across entire hotel chains. Dimitrios Neofitidis, managing director of Qbic, has already been completely won over by the benefits of this powerful analytical tool: "Reports are brilliant, it has already become part of my and my teams daily routine to log in and check."
Business Intelligence – a strategic tool
Business Intelligence can also be used to optimize central distribution through all online channels. Being able to accurately assess current bookings is essential for calculating the right price points for distribution. In order to do so, data from previous years and data concerning current particulars also has to be available right there where the pricing decisions are made.
Using time series analysis, Business Intelligence also allows hoteliers to predict temporary trends such as seasonal capacity utilization. Furthermore, it allows them to analyze anything from booking behavior to cancellation patterns, and from performing geographical analyses to campaign or social media activity success, as well as to run a large number of other analyses using big data.
Collecting and analyzing data is often viewed with a lot of skepticism in particular when it comes to data privacy. According to von Ditfurth, "Data stored in a central location can generally be very effectively protected, and the depth to which individual users can access this data through Business Intelligence is controlled by rights management systems. This means that the reservation division will, for example, be given access to different information than the revenue management division."
User-friendly and convenient
The hotel chain Qbic has been using hetras' Business Intelligence system as part of its daily routines from the moment it first introduced hetras. The wide range and highly versatile options for visualizing data in particular are helping Qbic to interpret data quickly and use the insights gained to provide guests with an even better hotel experience.
One of the many advantages of Business Intelligence is that it not only allows hoteliers to continuously further refine their analyses, but also to constantly analyze data for new kinds of information. "I looked at the actual reference data sources and I think that there is so much more to come and that we can achieve", explained Neofitidis when considering future advantages to be gained from data analyses.
Picture: Qbic Hotels
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