RevPar in the UK hotel industry is growing. According to PWC’s UK hotels forecast 2016, there will be 2.2% growth in ADR in London in 2016, which will help drive a RevPAR increase of 2.3% and take yields to £122.
But hoteliers should not become complacent because of market positivity. Could hotel revenues be increased further with better use of data? Clever businesses are now valuing ‘Smart Data’ – data which is analysed and acted on, over ‘Big Data’, and want any data use to make a difference to the bottom line.
Hospitality experts discuss reacting to data insights:
Good data usage can really help push the revenue of hotels by giving hotels the insight into what’s working, what isn’t, and what they should do to capitalize their assets. Customer data can tell hoteliers how to improve their hotel, and outside data such as weather can tell hotels how to change their prices.
Weather is a particularly rich area of data. According to a report by BSA, “Satellites, weather observatories, radar, and other sensors capture more than 2.25 billion weather data points 15 times per hour — collecting 20 terabytes per day — making more accurate weather predictions around the globe possible.” And this is of course very easily applicable to hotels as weather can be a massive influencer on guest behaviour.
2011 research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Lorin Hitt and Heekyung Kim found that companies that used data to drive decision making saw overall productivity improve by 5-6%
A 2014 survey by Forrester found that companies were analysing only 12% of the data that they already have. There is an unknowable amount of data out there, much of it unstructured and most of it still unused, but this is slowly changing.
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Video clips produced by ybc.tv for the Hospitality Channel, including interview from industry conferences such as the IHIF conference as well as specific Hospitality Channel shoots.
