Every aspect of the hotel business relies heavily on technology. Everything from reservations, operations, marketing and sales, to guest services, CRM and communications is powered by software.
Ideally, hotels would benefit from this influx of technology through improved operational efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced overall guest service quality. However, more often than not they’re facing challenges associated with technology and data silos and lack of interoperability among different vendors they’re using. These issues are preventing hotels from taking full advantage of hospitality solutions.
Property owners, hotel chains, and management companies experience these issues on a much greater scale. If data silos in different hotel departments limit business growth by hampering decision making, imagine how this magnifies in a multi-property scenario.
Without single-view dashboards that aggregate relevant data (e.g. occupancy info, booking sources, etc.) from all properties, there’s no way to analyze the whole picture, maximize performance, spot trends and red flags, and move the business forward.
How Multi-Property Companies Handle Hotel Data
This is a very complex problem as one Property Owner will have tens or hundreds of hotels with each hotel most likely having a different PMS system in place and those systems typically aren’t consistent and don’t share data nor allow for easy extraction.
This makes reporting incredibly difficult. Most of these companies are still collecting and processing information through XLS files instead of integrating various PMS systems to enable a single dashboard view of all properties.
So, why is this happening? Isn’t it logical to invest in integrations and custom-build an analytics solution that would power decision making and bring significant revenue gains in the long run?
The hospitality vendor landscape is constantly expanding with new single-purpose tools but this isn’t helping; to multi-property companies they look like yet another piece of technology that will be used in a single property team and exist in isolation from a wider technology ecosystem already in place.
Property owners are mistakenly looking at software vendors instead of potential technology partners to figure out how to maximize and protect their existing technology investments. The problem is that unlike vendors, the hospitality technology consultants landscape seems to be shrinking.
There’s lack of knowledge about technology consultancies and what they bring to the table and this is one of the main barriers to having interoperable, fluid systems that exchange and report data in a way that truly moves the needle for hotel businesses.
Is There a Silver Bullet for Multi-Property Data Integration?
The short answer is - there’s no such thing.
A large majority of multi-property companies aren’t looking to replace different PMS systems they have with a single solution that can be implemented across their portfolio. What they’re looking for is a way for those systems to communicate, share information, and ultimately report the data that’s meaningful to them.
The latter is key since not every company focuses on the same set of KPIs. But most of them suffer from data fragmentation and very few can say that they have a single view of their guest data from all touchpoints in their journey. This creates data integrity issues which consequently affects the hotel’s guest satisfaction and retention efforts.
The solution here is quite clear - break down data silos across and within properties with thoughtful integrations and create a custom dashboard that aggregates relevant data from PMS (e.g. revenue per available room, occupancy rate, etc.) and other key systems.
A custom dashboard like this enables companies to get a bird’s eye view of an entire hotel portfolio, see how their business is performing, and implement data-driven strategies to increase revenue.
In short, it helps turn data into opportunities and insights that lead to timely actions.
Centralizing Property Data with a Custom Dashboard
No matter if you are a management company or a hotel chain, you can always benefit from increased insights across properties. We’ve already established that a custom dashboard delivers exactly that through additional context. It saves you the time you’d otherwise need to spend piecing together data from disparate sources.
Ideally, you will work with a hospitality technology partner like LasoExperience who can help you build a dashboard that captures, integrates and stores all the key property data in a one centralized location, providing almost real-time analytics to portfolio managers and enabling them to run their hotels at unprecedented levels of efficiency.
This further gives you a significant competitive advantage over brands and groups who lack this level of data integration across properties.
