Maximizing Data: How Hospitality Brands Can Drive Summer Sales

As the busy season approaches, the hospitality industry finds itself at a critical juncture, seeking out new avenues for innovation and growth. From hotels to restaurants, technology leaders are strategizing ways to stay ahead of heightened customer expectations, fragmented data sources, and the loss of third-party cookies in digital environments. They require innovative solutions to deliver personalized experiences that safeguard consumer privacy. 

The demands of the current ecosystem have created an urgent need for smarter and more efficient ways for CDOs, CTOs, and their counterparts to leverage data. By optimizing data across their tech stack and collaborating with partners in new and enhanced ways, hotels and restaurants can grow their customer intelligence and unlock new insights that will drive increased sales this summer season and well into the future. 

1. Achieve hyper-personalization by increasing speed-to-value of technology investments

With hyper-personalization top of mind for hospitality leaders this summer, hotels and restaurants will need curated approaches to enhance guest satisfaction, spur customer loyalty, and grow revenue. For restaurants, which have historically had limited data on their customers, augmenting consumer targeting with third-party insights will be crucial to drive omnichannel engagement in seasonal menu items, expanded takeaway options, and other special offers. By comparison, hotels looking to drive higher occupancy rates and revenue per room will need to leverage their wealth of first-party insights to tailor the different ways travelers can experience their stay through meaningful and emotional connection points.

To achieve hyper-personalization, technologists need to optimize their first-party data foundation. Using an identity solution across the enterprise can connect disparate data points across business units to stitch together more consumer touchpoints and understand true customer lifetime value. In hotels, for example, this is critical to ensuring loyalty member guests don’t go unnoticed if they forget to book with their rewards account. Whether hospitality companies want to leverage these technologies in their data warehouse or cloud environment, identity connects data seamlessly to increase time-to-value with greater speed, efficiency, and cost savings. 

Breaking down data silos and gaining comprehensive insights into customer behavior leads to more effective loyalty programs and personalized experiences, all while making technology investments work more efficiently across all applications and business partners.

2. Accelerate the value of co-branding with privacy-enhancing technology

Once a hospitality company has built a strong first-party data foundation, it can advance toward achieving its personalization goals by sophisticating its partnerships. 

Marriott and United Airlines’ partnership is a classic example of how co-marketing strategies allow like-minded brands to grow and acquire more customers while saving costs. While co-branding has been a longtime staple of the hospitality industry, many partnerships have historically lacked scale and granular insights, leaving their full potential untapped. In fact, 54% of hospitality leaders say delivering personalized, privacy-forward experiences is a top business priority, but only 12% can do this with existing resources. In today’s regulatory landscape, that gap could be detrimental to enterprise growth. 

The onset of privacy-enhancing data collaboration technologies has created the ability to safely access and collaborate data in advanced ways. Data collaboration allows companies to merge and analyze datasets in a scalable, comprehensive, and privacy-focused manner, delivering powerful measurement capabilities, fueling product innovation, and enabling more sophisticated execution of partnerships. For example, travelers typically book airfare before accommodations. By collaborating more data with airlines, hotels can understand travelers’ plans and status tiers to provide valuable insight into what they may seek during their trips. 

Though co-branding is a popular strategy in hospitality, internal applications of data collaboration can bring major benefits too. Take a restaurant chain such as Chick-fil-A, for instance. Each franchise owns valuable customer data, but only that which occurs inside its four walls. By collaborating with other regional and even corporate locations, Chick-fil-A could access more holistic customer insights that illuminate consumer behavior on a deeper and more scaled level. With restaurant industry observances like July 12’s National French Fries Day on the horizon, this level of granularity can be what makes seasonal menu promotions a success. 

3. Create richer customer profiles with non-endemic data 

The built-in privacy and security protections of data collaboration technologies mean partnership efforts can scale from one-to-one to one-to-many. To develop a customer’s golden record through diverse data sources, hospitality brands should pursue connectivity to an extensive network of partners, including other brands, publishers, and platforms. 

Imagine if Marriott and United Airlines extended their partnership to an amusement park such as Six Flags. By bringing their data together, the trio could better reach customers and prospects in the market to travel with relevant offers, discounts, and other perks when they choose to fly, stay, and play with these three companies. Partnering with platforms such as Hulu can ensure targeted ads reach travelers at the exact time when they’re getting ready to book their trip. 

Extending to non-endemic partners will also uncover rich customer insights a hospitality brand may never have otherwise known. For example, a family with children under 10 will have a vastly different itinerary than that of a family with college kids. With greater access to transaction data, behavior insights, and intent signals, endemic and non-endemic companies can take customer experiences to new heights this summer season. 

Conclusion

Whether hospitality technologists prefer to build or buy, they must drive transformation for the business. With the common goal of driving hyper-personalization for travelers, diners, and guests, these leaders need interoperable and flexible solutions that can seamlessly connect every point of the customer journey.

In today’s complex landscape, hotels and restaurants can no longer afford to go it alone. Privacy-focused data collaboration is playing an increasingly crucial role by creating opportunities for brands to maximize the value of their data, combine resources, and unlock actionable insights that drive revenue and bookings. The businesses that collaborate this busy season are poised for long-term success and differentiated experiences for customers.