Data strategy continues to be a hot topic in the hospitality industry and there is still a long way to go to get it right, as Michael Schaeffner of Serenata IntraWare discusses in this video.

Data strategy evolution

We are at the very very start.  We still feel that, um, hotels, hotel groups are still blasting emails, you know which is going to – relevant the targeted messaging, which is still a very huge challenge.  So before talking about trip marketing and, you know, guest profiling, you kind of really have to, still, kind of work on the homework and on the basement.  So, I think we are at the very much beginning.  The good thing is I think that a lot of hotels and hotel groups have realised that they have to invest.  We’ve all just heard that earlier today, that it seems like it finally has arrived in our industry that's why it’s all been an exciting time for us because we get all sort of demand from the hotel groups out there that they’ve realised that they have to do something with their data.  Again, it just got started the whole data thing, it’s going to be a lot more, um, in 3 years, in 5 years and 10 years, um, if we kind of don’t, hotels don’t build a certain basis, I think they’re going to have a pretty pretty rough challenge moving forward.

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So, the first challenge at every single hotel in the group, no matter if it’s one star or if it’s five star, has the challenge that there’s duplicate profiles. Right, so the more hotels you have within a group the more challenging it gets to really talk to one Mark, to one Michael because, you know, we don’t know how many profiles there are within that group, you know, 20 hotels, 50, 100.  So that's the biggest challenge, so.  That's challenge number one and every single group has that so we try to build that in our profile so we don’t have that first big challenge any more that we talk up to 5 Mark’s, to 5 Michael’s or whatever.  So that's the key, um, and that's where we want to go because that for us is the foundation for our properly working CRM.  If you don’t know who that guy Mark is and how many times he has stayed within my hotel group, how many revenues he has been contributing to that group – it’s really hard to target you and market to you because, you know, maybe we – we’ll give you one profit where you only have one stay but there’s another profit where you have 55 stays.  So we’re talking about 2 totally different individuals, so that's the biggest challenge.

It takes, you know, a little bit of time to implement a system.  You know, we talk about our CRM system which affects every single department, so it’s definitely a project, you know, which just, you know, it just doesn’t come overnight, that's something which takes a while but then it goes very quickly because we constantly take data from the group.  So as soon as it’s implemented, you know, within 3, 6 months you can do very nice analysis and you see an impact on the first campaigns.  We do like, status quo analysis where we really compare the data from when we start and then when we move forward.  So that's the beauty of the time we live in, like you can very quickly analyse data and show impact and an improvement or also the other way around.