Maximizing hotel tech growth: The role of a dedicated data provider in identifying ideal customers

Companies buy market data all the time, but finding a provider with data quality, coverage and comprehensiveness, who is then able to maintain that data at the fast pace of market changes is a monumental challenge.

Add into it the particularities of the hotel industry and the hotel technology landscape, and you have yourself a proper challenge.

Luckily, at MetricsDriven we live

for proper challenges.

Let's look into just some of the pitfalls that can arise when working with non-specialist providers, such as

overpromising on data scope
underperforming on comprehensiveness.

In contrast, we'll provide the benefits of partnering with a specialist provider like us, who provide:

domain expertise in the hotel industry
a strong track record of delivering high-quality, comprehensive datasets.

LEGACY DATA

Generalist Data Providers

These are almost always non-specialists, who along with treating all hotel data sources the same (and oftentimes clients too), have no contextual understanding of the hotel industry and hotel market.

Let alone the complex web of hotel technology as it affects the day to day business of a hotel. An easy test is to simply ask about a PMS, or a CM or an IBE.

You'll be lucky if you get an answer to just one of these.

We see the results of these superficial datasets in our client's systems all the time.

Hotel entities with barely 4-5 datapoints, last updated 5 years ago or more, unclean or mismatched data, unformatted phone numbers, addresses and other data, plain incorrect information and much worse (Thai script in all text fields, anyone?).

And most annoying of all, tons and tons and TONS of duplicates due to errors in data collection, standardization and an overall lacking understanding of hospitality data.

Data Cleanliness and Consequences

The result of using non-specialists is usually a massive duplication of accounts in the client's database, no chance of merging data into existing accounts, lacking and non-verified fields etc.

Making not just the new data unusable but the literal corruption of what may have been good (albeit small in volume) data in the client's database before the experiment.

Not to mention the financial hit of buying this data initially.

What comes as a result of all this is actually extremely detrimental to the business, as all affected teams and processes face a spike in noise and clutter, slowing them down and affecting the revenue and financial stability of the entire business.

This phenomenon moves like a wave and can over time even bring a business down, as decision making becomes impaired and business intelligence blind.

Oftentimes, a business starts to recognize what is happening after a while, and reacts by purchasing more of equally flawed datasets. Based on either false promises or the hope that combining it with the previous ones may fix the issue.

In 100% of the cases we have seen so far, this does nothing but create a data debt and additional chaos.

We haven't even gone into how they would, or even if they could, update this data.

DATA HYGIENE

DATABASE UPDATES

Updating the database of hotels

Now imagine if this business also tried to work with a bunch of data providers at the same time.

In a desperate effort to clean and reign in their data they keep adding more and more datasets, coming from different providers.

The internal hotel data team is swamped with problems of normalization, merging, even determining a source of truth.

Other teams see the opportunity for being innovative and having data-driven insights, but wading through the mess is impossible, their hotel database grows but only in chaos.

Profitability is quickly affected, as the inaccurate market data cascades through the organization and the ability to make informed decisions diminishes.

As time passes, since data is almost certainly not updated in real-time, trust in the data drops.

This is justified as the travel industry does change at an increasingly rapid pace - maybe not as fast as many other industries but more than fast enough for .

Performance data (fast data) changes more rapidly and is affected faster.

This is a classic case of a specialist vs a generalist.

You wouldn't go to a family doctor and expect them to treat an acute heart issue, but to the best cardiologist who preferably specializes in treating the exact issue you're facing and has had hundred of cases to practice on.

In the same way you should only entrust your data acquisition to the best of the best.

We are those dedicated specialists, and we are happy to prove it by handling your data pipelines end to end, with accuracy and precision we promise you haven't had the pleasure of experiencing.

WORK WITH US

Working with data and hotel tech specialists

A team of specialists in this field will have a deep understanding of the hotel industry and the complex web of hotel technology, ensuring that they can provide accurate and relevant data solutions.

Data Acquisition

It's not all about how to collect hotel data, though in order to collect and combine many sources of data into one cohesive hotel database that includes global/worldwide, pricing, competitor, booking engine and other data that is suitable for advanced analytics, you definitely will need data scraping magic.

We are hotel industry's OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) specialists.

On top of this then comes the domain knowledge of the hotel tech landscape and how different technologies and market data interact with each other to form insights a hotel tech company can use - specific to your own product.

Single Source of Truth (and order)

Having one dedicated provider will mean there's no overlap with unstructured data from other sources, and there's only one line of agreement around data pipelines.

This makes the process very much linear, for all teams involved and ensures a standardization level across your organization so all stake holders and decision makers are always working on the same quality of up-to-date hotel data.

Cleaning up

The reason for mentioning all this and illustrating common scenarios is that we don't particularly look forward to being the data provider that will collect the detailed and accurate data for you, introduce the best benchmark, only to run into the internal messy leftovers of previous attempts at collecting data for the company.

Most often a fresh start that can be sequentially rolled out across teams is the best solution.

With data being updated on a set schedule so whenever a team is merged into the new database access, they are always on the same page as everyone else and always working with the best data.

MetricsDriven offers a full suite of data services to support your company's growth

Data acquisition and management
Validation and verification of data
Data cleansing and transformation
Data implementation help
Data-driven strategy consulting and discovery

TO WRAP IT UP

There's a lot more to it...

There's a lot more to this topic, and we're more than happy to have a discussion directly because every case is different.

Key point is you need domain experts and obsessive problem-solvers to help you solve your data challenges on multiple fronts.

Don't hesitate to reach out to us at hi@metricsdriven.net or set up a call to discuss your particular circumstances.

We love hearing ideas and especially challenges nobody has been able to pull off yet!

Book a meeting

MetricsDriven is a data technology provider out of London, UK.

We're forged from a unique combination of coding, marketing, scientific and technology backgrounds.

CONTACT

71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden,

London

United Kingdom

P: +44 144 9701 129

E: hi@metricsdriven.net

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