Which of your guests come back? Which hotels did they use in the past? What distinguishes them as guests? Up to now, hoteliers had to either completely rely on their experience or perform extensive surveys in order to answer these kinds of questions. However, hetras is now making it possible for users to use ElasticSearch – a hugely powerful open source solution designed for searching through vast amounts of data – in its cloud-based property management system. These searches are performed in real time and can also be easily performed from a smartphone.
"hetras already has millions of data sets", explained Philip von Ditfurth, one of hetras's three Managing Directors, "and, thanks to ElasticSearch, we can now not only provide our customers with real time data for their day-to-day operations, but also for their data analyses."
The data hotel operators have to deal with ranges from names and addresses to reservation reference numbers and more. This can quickly become very big data. ElasticSearch is capable of searching through a nearly unlimited amount of data of up to several terabytes at an extremely fast rate. This is of particular advantage in dynamic cloud environments, because ElasticSearch can be distributed and scaled.
Deeper insights for an even better hotel experience for guests
hetras has been using these benefits to its full advantage and is now enabling its users not only to search through the data from the last couple of days and weeks, but also through the data of all past and future bookings from all of the different hotels in a chain. Amongst others, search results can be filtered by all of the criteria one might, for example, find in reservations or guest profiles.
The advantages of doing so for hoteliers are not only highly practical, but also immense. Using hetras's reservation system feature not only allows to immediately see whether or not this is the first time a guest is staying at a certain hotel, but also how their preferences can be met the best. This allows to provide guests with an even better hotel experience – and not just in one single hotel, but across the entire chain.
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