Advances in technology allow hotels to collect vast amounts of data about their guests across all phases of their travel journey. Valuable pieces of information about 
their interests, their website journey, when and how they book, and more. Yet most companies are not making use of this commodity. What is holding us back from harvesting the valuable data resource? In an analysis of 4.5 million guest stays, central data platform, dailypoint™, reveals that hotels have a massive data problem. In fact, 68% of loyal guests have more than one guest profile, 18% of them had two profiles and 14% had three or more guest profiles. With so many duplicates, coupled with human-prone errors, it is no wonder hotels can’t leverage guest data to its fullest.
The root of the problem
First, data is often stored in many different closed systems, making it extremely difficult to consolidate into one central source. Those that do manage to consolidate the data often simply dump it into a database or data warehouse. This presents even the most skilled analysts with the next problem: the data is stored in different formats and qualities, often contains duplicates, contradictions, inaccuracies, etc. With such poor quality, the output is often unusable. Hotels must start by storing data centrally, in one system. This has the added benefit of ensuring GDPR compliance. With one system for all data, a guest’s profile can easily be amended, exported for the guest, or deleted with one click.
Central data management is not enough
Once the data is centrally stored, it must then be cleaned and structured. This shouldn’t be done by a team of staff, but rather automatically with a system like dailypoint’s patent-pending Data Laundry solution, which reviews data points from all relevant hotel systems (PMS, CRM, newsletters, etc.), merges duplicates, corrects mistakes from human errors and ultimately creates a single profile for each guest. The clean data can then be pushed back to the PMS and stored in dailypoint™ so that all data is up-to-date across sources. This gives hotels one single source of truth for all guest data and allows for more personalized sales and marketing, streamlined operations, and more strategic business decisions.
The results are clear
In its analysis, dailypoint™ found that using dailypoint’s Data Laundry solution, hotels saw a 7% reduction in guest profiles through the automatic consolidation of data. Further, the industry has recognized that data is king and that clean data is key to a hotel’s success. The solution has recently been selected as a finalist in HTNG’s (Hospitality Technology Next Generation) 2019 TechOvation Award competition, which recognizes technology innovation in the hospitality industry. The finalists were chosen by a panel of senior hospitality executives and CIOs in New Orleans at HT-NEXT, including: Dan Kornick, CIO of Loews Hotels, Sireesha Kunduri, VP of Engineering at Choice Hotels International, Wendy Mertz, VP of IT Applications and Strategy at Hard Rock International, Monika Nerger, Global CIO at Mandarin Oriental, Marco Trecroce, SVP & CIO at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and many others.