Building on the insights from “The Future of Hotel Data” report by Hapi and Revinate, the importance of data unification for hotel chains seeking to maximise their marketing efforts cannot be overstated. While individual properties grapple with fragmented systems and limited data access, these challenges are amplified exponentially for multi-property or multi-brand hotel chains.
For hotel chains, data unification is not merely an operational efficiency; it is a strategic imperative for competitive marketing. Here’s why it’s so critical:
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Enabling a True 360° Guest Profile Across the Portfolio: A key vision highlighted in the report is the creation of a 360° guest profile, unifying data across all touchpoints to enhance personalisation. For a hotel chain, this means having a single, comprehensive view of a guest, regardless of which property they stayed at, visited, or interacted with within the entire chain. As Yusuf Hefny from Hotel Clover Patong Phuket expressed in the report, gaining complete, real-time access to all data would first allow for the building of a unified guest profile that merges data from all systems, facilitating a 360-degree view for segmentation and activation across marketing, operations, and service touchpoints. This holistic understanding, including booking history, preferences, and interactions across various properties and amenities (like restaurants, spas, or golf courses), is essential for delivering truly relevant marketing messages. Without it, marketing remains siloed, inefficient, and often repetitive, leading to missed opportunities for cross-property engagement.
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Driving Deep Personalisation and Loyalty at Scale: The report explicitly states that poor data quality hinders the ability to deliver personalized experiences, directly impacting guest satisfaction and revenue. For a chain, this means generic offers, inconsistent service recognition, and a failure to build lasting connections across the brand. The report emphasizes that unified data allows for personalized communication, customized promotions, and proactive service, ultimately driving revenue through tailored engagement. When a guest’s preferences are known across the entire chain, marketing efforts can be tailored to their specific interests, promoting sister properties, offering relevant upgrades, or extending loyalty benefits seamlessly, thereby increasing customer lifetime value. This fosters genuine brand loyalty, moving beyond transactional relationships to true guest advocacy.
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Optimising CRM and Loyalty Systems for Maximum Impact: The survey identified CRM and loyalty systems as priority areas for data quality improvements for nearly half (46%) of respondents. For hotel chains, these systems are the backbone of their customer relationship strategy. According to the report, without strong, unified CRM data, hoteliers struggle to build lasting connections, diminishing retention and repeat business opportunities across their entire portfolio. When guest preferences, booking history, and behavioural trends are accurately tracked and unified across all properties, the chain can deliver relevant offers, improve upselling strategies, and significantly increase customer lifetime value. This means loyalty programs become more powerful, allowing for consistent guest recognition and rewards, which in turn reinforces brand loyalty and drives higher engagement.
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Enabling Dynamic Segmentation and Targeted Campaigns: With unified data, hotel chains can implement dynamic segmentation and targeting based on real-time behaviours and psychographics. This allows marketing teams to identify highly specific audience segments across their entire customer base, regardless of which property a guest initially interacted with. For example, a chain could identify guests who frequently book spa services at one property and market spa promotions at other properties they might visit. The report highlights that hotels that implement advanced segmentation strategies see increased conversion rates and stronger guest retention, as personalized offers resonate more effectively with travelers. This precise targeting ensures marketing spend is highly efficient, reaching the right guest with the right message at the right time, through the most effective channels.
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Leveraging AI for Predictive Marketing: The report highlights AI’s role in enhancing personalization and automating processes. Critically, identity resolution, powered by AI, is described as a “hotel’s superpower” for unifying guest data. For a chain, this means AI can consolidate vast amounts of guest data from various properties and systems into a single, accurate profile. As Trent Pigram of Seibu Prince Hotels & Resorts envisions in the report, this would allow leveraging AI to unify real-time data from across the hotel ecosystem – including PMS, CRM, booking engine, guest feedback, digital ads, and web analytics – into actionable insights, enabling smarter decisions, predicting guest behaviour, personalising messaging, and dynamically optimising ad creative and timing. This predictive capability is invaluable for proactive and highly effective marketing across a chain.
In essence, for hotel chains, data unification transforms fragmented information into a cohesive, actionable asset. It empowers marketing teams to move beyond generic campaigns, enabling hyper-personalisation, efficient resource allocation, and a truly unified brand experience that drives repeat business and maximizes overall revenue across the entire portfolio, as emphasized throughout the “Future of Hotel Data” report.
