Project Overview

The hotel and hospitality sector caters to millions of travellers every day, and each one of them checks in with their own set of expectations. Meeting those expectations is the key to getting people to return, and increasingly hotel and leisure operators are turning to advanced analytics solutions for clues about how to keep their customers happy.

Big Data isn’t just a future trend in the hotel world — it’s already helping hoteliers create a better customer experience and a more profitable business.

Business Scenario

Although the marketing departments of hotels would loathe to admit it, not all guests are equal in the eyes of hotel and leisure operators. Some will simply check in and check out with a minimum of fuss. Others will spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on fine dining, entertainments, sports activities and spa treatments. Identifying those customers with a higher overall lifetime value to a particular business is hugely important in today’s market, but a customer’s lifetime value might not be empirically obvious from observing their behaviour during one visit.
Analytics has applications in all of these areas and although the hotel and hospitality sector has lagged behind others such as retail and manufacturing in adopting an analytics-first philosophy that could be starting to change.

Business Requirement

Would it be possible to ensure that each room attracts the optimal price – taking into account troughs and peaks in demand throughout the year as well as other factors, such as weather and local events, which can influence the number (and type) of guests checking in? This is where business intelligence and data analytics, mining of the immense business data left behind, finding trends and patterns would help our client.

Challenge

• Migration of huge amount of un-organised critical and sensitive data in an organized manner.
• Mining the data

Our Solution

The dashboards were built using Power BI to perform a time-trend analysis so that hotels can more accurately forecast seasonal events that affect occupancy. This ranges from understanding booking behaviors to predicting cancelation rates. Our solution makes agile analytics programs and flexible management style possible. With the advent of travel review sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor) and social media, hotels get a vast amount of insight into consumer likes and dislikes. Add to this hotels’ own massive data reserves from CRMs and loyalty programs and you’ve got a great idea on the right price-value combination for your customers- All you need is intelligent data analytics like the data scientists at Pearl do.

Highlights

Employing Business data analytics helped them to realize the following goals

• Accurate insights through dashboards to improve business operations,
• Plan better marketing strategies.
• Yield Management to stabilise occupancy rates and yield.
• It allows the restaurant department to predict which menu items are likely to be ordered, based for example on the local weather.
• It allows the reservation department to predict the optimal rate for a room.
• It enables the sales and marketing team to create and send tailored messages across different networks.
• Predictive Analytics: To determine “what next”. “This allows hoteliers to make adjustments as they go forward based on insights gathered through econometrics; guests’ purchasing and stay behaviours; activity on our delivery channels, such as our brand.com websites and mobile apps; and so forth.
• Customer Segmentation dashboard to create a unique selling proposition which leads to increase in revenue and also aids in upselling and cross selling of facilities resulting in better revenue & profits.

The Results

Pearl has helped the client know the pulse of their market by empowering them to

• Sift through massive amounts of information- from customer feedback to room price, length of stay and more-to understand why customers choose their hotels and why they choose to return.
• Cut down their energy costs without sacrificing guest comforts.
• Evaluate an itenarys’s likelihood of success, For example, the concierge can now know which local tours to recommend that fit a guest’s preference based on his past behaviour.

About Pearl

Pearl Global Solutions, in Houston, Texas, USA, enables digital transformation for enterprises by delivering business efficiency and actionable insights through an integrated set of Business Intelligence & Analytics technologies. Business Data Analytics is our core area of excellence where our data scientists devise strategies for business data management using business intelligence tools like Power BI, Tableau, SSIS, SSRS and R language. With an India centre in Cochin, Pearl specializes in D3JS, Python and also extends its presence to Texas.