Whether you’re in charge of five properties or 500, when you know how to action your hotel information and access data insights, you can match the agility of any of your competitors.
Getting your data together should be a two-pronged approach:
- Utilizing the proper data-analysis tools and platforms to aggregate and highlight your relevant hotel data
- Not overthinking it
At its core, hotel management is a people business. Do you know a single hotel person who got into the business because they want to sit behind a computer screen looking at spreadsheets? We’re a business of people who like people.
The faster you get your hotel data in order, the easier it will be for you to focus it into what matters most — delighting your guests.
Start by protecting — not growing — hotel profits
Audit. Before you start looking around for the hottest trends in the hospitality industry and spying on what your competitors are doing, audit your properties. If you want to increase your profits, the lowest hanging-fruit you can pick is simply grabbing up the money you’re throwing away each day through inefficient practices.
By simply eliminating the waste, despite the labour cost or wage rates, many hotels can save five to 15 per cent of labour expenses.
How can your hotels operate more effectively to 1) reduce overlap during predictably slower operating hours and 2) train your staff to empower them to do their work with more confidence and efficiency? With the right bird’s-eye hotel-data-analytics tools, you can identify these excess labour costs and improve your overall operations.
What is your current hotel-data telling you that you can address today? Get these standards set in place before you start to get more creative with your data analytics.
Utilize real-time hotel-data reporting to give yourself agility
As an owner/operator or property manager, you have enough on your plate with day-to-day logistics alone. If you juggle staffing, budgets, improvement, maintenance, hotel-data analysis, team management, surprises and more, you have to maximize your time.
When it comes to hotel-data analysis, you don’t have time (or money) to spend on analytics tools that fall short. If you don’t have all your key hotel-data points in one location or access your data in real-time, you need to consider modernizing your systems.
Finding software options that are able to aggregate your various hotel-data points into one user-friendly platform can save you valuable hours each week. Rather than pulling through dozens of interfaces — each with different credentials, layouts and export types — you and your team will only need one reporting platform. This allows you to spend more time focusing on actioning the hotel data that truly impacts the guest experience.
Bonus: If you can find software options that offer a visual component to data analysis, it can make identifying trends that much simpler. Pull yourself and/or your team out of the black-hole of hotel-data analysis with these kinds of visual and user-friendly platforms.
If you manage multiple properties, consider cloud-based analytics your team can access anytime, anywhere. Creating a shared space empowers large teams to share and access information instantly and gets your entire organization on the same page.
Trust what you know and back it with data
When it comes to analyzing the immense amount of hotel-portfolio data you have, don’t overthink it. You have more user data at your fingertips than ever before. Start small, lock it in, then build on it. After all, your primary day-to-day focus is still on your guests.
Simple to use, intuitive, cloud-based solutions are a cost-effective place to start. By trying to be the best at everything, you risk overwhelming your guests with options they didn’t ask for. You might also lose sight of what truly works for a specific hotel, brand, location, demographic, et cetera. It’s much easier to return a happy guest than to start all over with a brand-new lead.
Learn more about hotel information-management and data-visualization solutions by myDigitalOffice at mydigitaloffice.com.
