Hotels are flooded with data. From booking patterns and revenue performance to housekeeping efficiency and guest feedback, this data holds the key to how a hotel operates, but it can be hard to make sense of it all.
With data scattered across systems and departments, hotels need to find a way to bring it all together to see what’s going on in the business and what needs to be done to improve.
In this article, we explore how hotels can turn their data into action and align across departments using business intelligence.
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What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of making data meaningful. For hotels, BI aggregates data from multiple sources – guest behaviour, booking patterns, folio transactions, housekeeping efficiency, and more – and turns it into actionable insights for management. This consolidation gives teams a single view of the data so they can make informed decisions.
In reality, BI helps hotels:
- Make decisions that match their goals
- Get departments working towards the same objectives
- Optimise resources
- Predict market changes
- Improve efficiency and profit
The role of technology in business intelligence
With so many systems in use by hotels today – from property management systems (PMS) to revenue management systems and reputation management tools – business intelligence would be impossible without technology.
A business intelligence system organises data from multiple sources to generate actionable insights. Hotels can choose from generic BI tools built for a range of industries or opt for a hospitality-focused system designed with the demands of hoteliers in mind.
Hospitality-specific BI systems integrate across a hotel’s technology stack, eliminating the inefficiencies of generic tools like data mapping or building custom reports from scratch. Instead, with deep integrations into the PMS, hotels have real-time data, visualisations, and custom reporting designed around hospitality KPIs and metrics.
Business intelligence across departments
Each department has a role to play in delivering value to the guest and the bottom line. The type of data collected and analysed varies and impacts decision-making differently. Here we look at how data and business intelligence can be used across departments.
Finance and Accounting
Understanding the financial health of your hotel and making changes to reduce costs, monitor cash flow, and improve profit margins is key to a successful business. With business intelligence, hotels can track and analyse expenses, revenue streams, and cost drivers and make real-time changes to the bottom line.
With integrated business intelligence software data is pulled from the point of sale, PMS and payment systems to simplify the reconciliation process so hotels can see where to cut costs and where to invest more.
For example, through BI, the finance team identifies that food and beverage expenses have increased disproportionately compared to revenue. Further analysis reveals that the on-site restaurant is overordering perishable items. Armed with this insight, the hotel adjusts its ordering and improves inventory management to reduce costs.
Marketing and distribution
Marketing and distribution require a lot of data to know which guests to target on which channels. With business intelligence, hotels can better understand profitable guest segments, their preferences, and booking behaviour to create effective marketing and distribution strategies.
With the right data, hotels can better allocate their resources, focusing on high-value segments and channels that drive the most total revenue. Integrated business intelligence solutions make this easier, using data from the PMS and CRM. Together, these systems give a 360-degree view of guest preferences and behaviour across touchpoints.
Say a popular beach hotel is looking to maximise bookings during the shoulder season. A BI system may reveal that families who visited during the previous off-season booked multi-room stays and signed their kids up for activities. With this information, the marketing team can create a seasonal campaign targeting families promoting discounted packages that include a free activity.
This report showcases what channels drive the highest booked revenue and their average booking value, helping hotels determine the most profitable distribution strategy.
Guest experience
Personalising the guest experience is key to satisfaction and loyalty, but it is easier said than done. Business intelligence plays a big role in helping hotels understand guest preferences and expectations by analysing past stays, service preferences, and feedback. With this data, hotels can build out guest profiles and personalised touchpoints across the guest journey.
For example, business intelligence tools may identify that a particular segment, such as business travellers, frequently use the on-site restaurant and select early check-in. Using this information when a business traveller books, the hotel can then send a personalised email with a link to book a dinner reservation and early check-in. This data-driven personalisation gives the guest what they want and opens up new revenue streams through targeted upsells.
Using business intelligence software, hotels can compare and contrast guest data, helping identify trends for personalised experiences.
Revenue management
Revenue management has always been a data-heavy department. To price dynamically in real-time, revenue managers must consider demand patterns, competitor pricing, booking patterns and more.
With business intelligence tools, revenue managers and other departmental leaders can quickly analyse and visualise this information. Dashboards that track demand shifts and report on RevPAR allow teams to collaborate and make changes that impact the bottom line.
Suppose a big-name star is coming to town for a concert. The revenue manager at a boutique hotel near the venue uses BI software and sees that competitors are raising their rates significantly for standard rates, and a significant portion of travellers are searching for late check-out options.
Based on these insights, the revenue manager increases rates for standard rooms to match the rising demand and works with marketing to create a special concert package that includes late check-out and transportation to the event.
Unifying departments
Many hotels still operate in silos, with each department focusing on its own goals and metrics. While departments are equally important, a lack of alignment often leads to missed opportunities and inefficiencies. With business intelligence systems, data is unified, creating a single source of truth accessible to all teams.
With shared dashboards and reports, teams can come together to analyse performance and identify factors impacting cross-departmental initiatives. As in our example above, insights from one department, like guest feedback from guest experience teams, can impact marketing campaigns and revenue management strategies.
Emerging technologies and forward-looking data
New technologies are emerging to make this process easier for hotel teams. For example, causal AI is making it possible to use forward-looking data, providing predictive insights to optimise operations. Unlike traditional methods that rely mainly on historical data, predictive analytics uses advanced algorithms to forecast future outcomes so hotels can make proactive, not reactive decisions.
For example, if competitor rates are trending down, hotels could launch early bird discounts or package offers to sell more rooms earlier in the booking window.
This unified forward-looking approach not only aligns departments but allows hotels to respond faster to market changes. Hotels need to get data-driven if they want to increase profitability and guest satisfaction and stay competitive.
Final thoughts
In short, hotels must make informed decisions backed by data. By leveraging hospitality-specific business intelligence systems and other emerging technology, hotels can access detailed reports, forecasting capabilities, multi-property views, and compelling visuals to support data-driven decisions.
About Cloudbeds
Cloudbeds is the leading platform redefining the concept of PMS for the hospitality industry, serving tens of thousands of properties in more than 150 countries worldwide. Built from the ground up to be masterfully unified and scalable, the award-winning Cloudbeds Platform brings together built-in and integrated solutions that modernise hotel operations, distribution, guest experience, and data & analytics.
