Stephen Barr, co-founder and managing partner at Noetic, understands this: “When we plan acquisition campaigns for custom- ers, I don’t feel any need to tell them that our biggest data table has three-quarters of a bil- lion lines of data in it, because it isn’t relevant, it’s just big data. What I do tell them is that we can improve their customer acquisition pro- gramme, typically saving them 30%-plus of their entire media spend, by using our ability to sift through lots of data to find the patterns that are most efficient at delivering new guests at lower costs, and then using automated pro- cess to expand the campaigns that work best, while culling campaigns that aren’t as good.” In short, the analytical process may be sophisticated, but essentially it does what all good media planners would do if they had the bandwidth to do it – and nowadays, no one has. By making the most of new tech, hote- liers can crunch through big data and make informed decisions to maximise revenue.
DIRECT GUEST ACQUISITION Unfortunately, too few hoteliers are mak- ing use of big data analysis, Barr believes. “Most hotels are not yet thinking differently about big data,” he says. “That’s largely what’s behind many of the complaints about online travel agents. Hotels don’t want to pay the large commissions they’re being asked for, but too often also don’t want to use the direct acquisition tools that already exist to get those guests themselves.” Senior managers who are looking to bring in those first-time guests themselves are increasingly aware that the key to winning repeat business is understanding and man- aging the guest experience before, during and even after their hotel stay. Capturing data about each guest visit is important because it helps managers to make two essential predic- tions: will they come back? And if so, when? Barr says: “Quantifying the experiences and using that data to predict future behaviour is one theme we’re seeing. Another trend is that there is more real data gap analysis.” Rather than using the traditional method
of budgets and historic best-guesses to gauge the level of future demand, operators can now use the guest data itself to do that.
Case study: Novus Leisure
In a nutshell One of the UK’s largest bar, club and restaurant operators with 47 venues.
Location Mostly London- based brands such as Balls Brothers, but Tiger Tiger is UK-wide.
Simon Gaske, customer experience director at Novus Leisure, says data is the key to improving business, and
6 | Technology Prospectus 2018
that Novus deals with data in a number of ways. First, the traditional way:
compiling a database of its customers’ names, gender and dates of birth – and more recently requesting social handles. Reservations data is then mixed in to extend the view of a customer’s behaviour and business interaction. This is topped off with data gathered from a Novus platform that tracks
customer feedback in real time from social platforms such as Facebook and websites such as TripAdvisor. “Mapping the traditional,
reservation and customer feedback data points together lets us begin to see a true view of our customer,” Gaske says. “Not only who they are, but what they want, coupled with their likes and dislikes.”
www.novusbars.com
“It is often easy to predict how full a hotel is going to be, based on the sheer
wealth of data it is sitting on” Stephen Barr
“It is often easy to predict how full a hotel is going to be in the future, based on the sheer wealth of data that most businesses are sitting on. The data just needs to be made available and prepared in such a way that these predic- tions can be made and in real time,” says Barr. For instance, if you know three months before a certain date that you’re likely to miss a revenue target and that the miss relates to a particular customer segment, such as week- enders, you have time for your customer rela- tionship management team to put together an offer for your direct customers and time to see the results well before you have to panic and dump discounted rooms into the market in a desperate attempt to hit target.
“Using the new technology enables good decisions to be made earlier, which means you’re less likely to be in a position where you can only make a poor decision or no decision,” Barr explains.
Cloud-based hospitality solutions can help
operators to get a clear, real-time picture of the market by presenting data in context with other data (see article on page 22). Simon Bocca, chief operating officer at forecasting and cost-control software provider Fourth, says: “The victors in the battle against rising costs and competition
www.thecaterer.com
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