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Data is everywhere, but making it actionable is what makes data matter. In the hotel industry, data is key: helping properties not only know their guests better but also understand how to run their hotels at an optimized level. Better data enables better revenue management by analyzing demand patterns, allowing hotels to optimize pricing and maximize occupancy. Operational efficiency also improves when data is used to forecast staffing needs, manage inventory and streamline services. Additionally, data-driven insights support targeted marketing campaigns, helping hotels reach the right customers at the right time.
In the end, it should translate into better profit.
HOTELS Magazine highlights five companies that are unlocking the data door and making hotels smarter.
Duetto
Find them @: duettocloud.com
Imagine a room full of data points, where, like a middle-school dance, no one talks to one another. That is one of the challenges when it comes to data, explains Robert Matsuoka, chief technology officer at Duetto, which, through its tools, helps hotels drive revenue and maximize profitability. “Every hotel sits on a mountain of data—booking pace, market demand, guest segmentation, competitive pricing—but most of that data lives in disconnected systems that don’t talk to each other,” he said. “The result is that revenue decisions still get made on gut feel or stale spreadsheets.” Without data, you are just another person with an opinion. “Data matters because it replaces guesswork with precision,” Matsuoka said. Duetto takes an open-platform approach in order to achieve this, integrating with over 40 property management systems, channel managers and BI tools, “so that revenue strategy is built on a hotel’s complete data picture, not a partial one,” Matsuoka said. Consider its GameChanger tool: It sets real-time rates based on room types, booking channels and customer segments, rather than rigid BAR-based models. Greater revenue is complemented by cost savings through automation. “The net effect is more revenue captured per available room, less labor spent on low-value tasks, and pricing decisions grounded in real-time market signals rather than yesterday’s numbers,” Matsuoka said.
Otelier
Find them @: otelier.io
If data were an element, it would be gold, according to Jason Freed, hospitality data evangelist at Otelier, a data platform that gives hoteliers a 360-degree portfolio view. “It should power every decision across hotel operations and ownership,” he said. In “Any Given Sunday,” Al Pacino’s character gives the iconic “Game of Inches” speech, emphasizing that success comes down to fighting for small margins. Each day, hotels fight for those margins, which data can help expand. “Data helps keep a hotel business sustainable for the long term by continually improving the guest experience and protecting profitability,” Freed said. “It gives teams a clear understanding of their business and the ability to adjust operations accordingly across every department.” Otelier centralizes and normalizes data from disparate systems, giving hoteliers a full view of their business. In Freed’s estimation, it comes down to visibility. With clean, accurate data, teams can operate more efficiently by automating back-office tasks, building more reliable budgets and forecasts and turning data insights into operational enhancements,” he said. “With visibility across [departments], hoteliers can make incremental improvements across operations that ultimately drive both revenue and profit.” Otelier is also leveraging AI in its BI. Within IntelliSight, AI enables hoteliers to query their data and build charts and dashboards using natural, conversational language.
Actabl
Find them @: actabl.com
At Actabl, profitability is the end-all goal. Its four products, then, serve as the roadmap, labor optimization, business intelligence, operations management, asset and CapEx management. All of these tools depend on data. “It is the foundation for every decision a hotel makes,” said Steven Moore, CEO of Actabl. The difference, he continued, comes down to adoption and behavior. “If teams are not consistently using systems that create the data they need, the data becomes incomplete or unreliable,” he said. Enter AI, which, he argued, has raised the stakes; still, AI is only as good as the data that feeds it. “When you get that sequence right, adoption leads to better data, which in turn leads to clearer insights, and those insights drive measurable performance,” he said, adding that Actabl is using AI to help operators get to insights faster and make those insights easier to act on within the daily workflow. Actabl’s approach focuses on turning data into action and on the areas that most directly impact profitability, which include operational efficiency and labor, the latter a hotel’s largest expense line. “What ties this together is execution,” Moore said. “Insights alone do not improve performance.” Data, alone, is ineffective if it’s not put into action, which leads to sustained gains in both revenue and profitability. “That is where data becomes powerful,” Moore said.
CoStar Group
Find them @: costar.com
Not long after Randy Smith and his wife, Carolyn, launched STR (née Smith Travel Research) in 1985, did the data they produced become essential for hoteliers to compare a hotel’s performance against a competitive set across three main KPIs: occupancy, ADR and RevPAR. In 2019, CoStar Group acquired STR for $450 million, illustrating the value attached to data. It’s something Amanda Hite, president of STR, knows all too well. She’s made a career out of it. “Data matters because it transforms uncertainty into insight,” she said. “Across the hotel industry—whether managing one property or a global portfolio—data provides the clarity required to make confident, informed decisions.” STR, now under the aegis of CoStar, a global provider of commercial real estate information, made its mark in benchmarking—the method of comparing one organization’s performance against another, allowing for insight into strengths and weaknesses, ultimately identifying areas of improvement. “Benchmarking performance against budgets and the competitive landscape allows owners and operators to optimize development, acquisition, operations, revenue strategy and asset disposition,” Hite said. While STR made its name providing top-line metrics, it added, of late, profitability benchmarking that delivers full profit-and-loss performance, giving hoteliers visibility into each operating department. On the AI front, STR will look to borrow from CoStar, which owns the residential listing portal Homes.com. “The introduction of Homes AI, which brings real-time, voice-enabled guidance into the home search experience, reflects our focus on applying AI where it genuinely improves decision-making,” Hite said. “We see that same opportunity within STR.”
Kalibri
Find them @: kalibrilabs.com
Cindy Estis Green, the co-founder and CEO of Kalibri, built a business focused on a crucial challenge facing hoteliers: cost of customer acquisition. In the age of intermediaries, that cost can be high. By most accounts, hotel customer acquisition costs can typically range from 15% to 25% of gross room revenue, with some properties spending up to 40%. This cost includes commissions to online travel agencies (OTAs), marketing spend and loyalty program expenses. Kalibri’s ProfitFirst platform helps hoteliers identify the most profitable opportunities in their market, already net of acquisition costs, “so time and resources are focused on what is truly accretive to profit,” Estis Green said. In her pursuit, data is key because it allows hoteliers to identify opportunities, diagnose problems and evaluate performance. The difference today is the velocity of it. “It is not just the volume of data available, but how quickly it can be delivered in an actionable form,” she said. “Today, teams don’t have to wait for end-of-month reporting. They can see what’s happening in real time and act on it immediately.” It’s that speed that separates reactive operators from proactive ones, who can achieve superior commercial results focused on profit. Kalibri also uses AI to allow hoteliers a clearer look into their current business and future. Its ProfitMix tool gives hoteliers a clear view of demand, including its value, how it books, the channels it flows through, when it materializes, how much is tied to loyalty programs and which hotels currently have that business today. “Instead of searching across multiple reports, teams can immediately identify, target and convert the most profitable mix of business,” Estis Green said.
The character of 21st-century leadership: Personal attributes
- Positive energy, personal balance, and inspiration. This collection of traits is focused on managers’ need to develop (and protect) the mind, body, and spirit. Managers will find themselves bereft of the energy to learn and lead if they don’t have a clear understanding of what makes them tick. And at a time when—as recent McKinsey research shows—a mobile, postpandemic, multigenerational workforce is looking for more connection, more authenticity, and more inspiration from their leaders, that energy is becoming a critical commodity.1
- Servant and selfless leader. The highest-performing leaders we’ve observed are focused on making the team and others successful. It’s not about them; it’s about others’ deeds, actions, and outcomes. It’s about the organization’s mission, deep purpose, and positive impact. Such a leadership approach becomes more important when considering the results of a recent McKinsey survey in which 70 percent of about 1,000 employees said their work largely defines their sense of meaning and purpose.2
- Continuous learning and humble mindset. Leaders can’t be afraid to take risks; they must be endlessly curious and learn from their mistakes. The highest-performing leaders we’ve observed never consider themselves to be the highest expert or the smartest person in the room. Their superpowers are their humility and willingness to be vulnerable. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, for instance, advocated for greater transparency and a learn-it-all rather than a know-it-all attitude at all levels of the company, helping propel its cultural transformation.3
- Grit and resilience. Hard as it may be sometimes, leaders need to be stoic in the face of disruption. They excel at assimilating the best ideas around them but never waver from making the tough decisions when it is called for. They don’t disappear when times get tough. They calmly analyze the root cause of a situation, adjust behaviors, depersonalize, and bounce forward—never too high, never too low. According to the latest Organizational Health Index research, those companies with leaders who act decisively—and who commit to the decisions made—are 4.2 times more likely than their peers to be healthy.4
- Levity. The high-performing leaders we’ve observed recognize that it’s important to bring humor to their conversations, sometimes even during serious matters. Moments of humor can help teams bond, defuse high-stress situations, and unlock the creativity of the full group. Indeed, research has shown that leaders with a sense of humor—even a so-so sense of humor—are 27 percent more motivating and inspiring than others.5 Employees are 15 percent more engaged when they work with such leaders versus with other leaders, and teams are twice as creative, as measured by having them solve a creativity challenge.
- Stewardship. The best-performing leaders take the long view; they see themselves as stewards of their organizations and teams “for now.” They understand that markets will shift, customer demands will change, and the tasks of leadership will evolve as the organization does. With that in mind, they adopt an intentional approach to developing leadership capabilities across the organization. When they are done, they aim to leave the team and the institution stronger, more relevant, and more sustainable than when they joined.
- Engage—rigorously and relentlessly—with all key stakeholders. Constructive dialogue and debate will set the best-performing companies apart from competitors. Leaders must therefore catalyze rigorous discussions across the organization—among senior leaders, with frontline workers, with the board, and so on. Leaders can rely on a number of tried-and-true methods, such as premortems, red team and blue team exercises, and what-if sessions, to facilitate these conversations. Such methods are particularly important to implement when considering tough-to-reverse decisions, which also require candor, a willingness to make trade-offs, and the courage to take a stand. And once those decisions are made, leaders must support them with clear communications. They need to craft brief, authentic messages that cut through information overload and set out tangible outcomes that people can measure and feel. The best communicators during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, had a clear playbook: they gave people the information they needed when they needed it, and they stated it clearly, frequently, and memorably.
- Enroll (and reenroll) the team. Leaders need to ensure that everyone is fully enrolled in the company’s vision and strategy and willing to contribute of their own free will. This is different from simply gaining buy-in; individual members of an enrolled team are personally impelled to carry out the organization’s mission. Enrolled employees are self-disciplined, self-motivated, and more likely than others to enforce standards and correct any deviations from them. Most important, leaders need to continually revisit the conditions—the behaviors, motivations, and processes—that will facilitate that deep enrollment and correct course as needed.
- Build an operating model—and establish an operating cadence—that’s wired for speed. Rather than run business activities through traditional matrixed organizations and reporting lines, leaders should explore models that allow for speed: clear decision-making rights, few layers of bureaucracy, and tech-enabled information sharing. Leaders should aim to deploy standardization of processes where it makes sense, engage frontline leaders directly; institutionalize best practices through playbooks, trainings, and other formats; and share information via digital dashboards and other tools. Doing these things will create a performance edge, increase productivity, instill accountability, and substantially speed up decision making.
- Emphasize a culture of trust. The trust equation as developed by thought leader Charles H. Green looks like this: credibility times reliability times intimacy divided by self-orientation.6 As American economist and statesman George Shultz wrote for his 100th birthday: “‘Trust is the coin of the realm.’ When trust was in the room, whatever room that was—the family room, the schoolroom, the coach’s room, the office room, the government room, or the military room—good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is details.”7 Thus, a critical task for the 21st-century leader is to analyze where the organization is strongest and weakest along each element of the trust equation, and systematically address any issues with reliability, credibility, or vulnerability.
- Set leadership attributes. The current leadership team must sharply define the attributes needed in the team and in the organization. It must help aspiring and high-potential leaders understand what leadership is—and isn’t. Leadership isn’t about consensus; it’s about alignment. It’s not about being popular, but it does require engagement. It’s not about working apart from the team, but it does involve making sometimes-tough solo calls. It requires the temperament to manage these polarities and achieve balance. Leadership can be lonely at times. It requires extra reserves of confidence, grit, and an ability to compartmentalize. In the words of Douglas MacArthur, “The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.”9
- Don’t wait—get started now. Right off the bat, leaders should assign high-potential managers to the toughest situations, putting them in uncomfortable positions, and providing them with the right mentorship and continuous coaching.
- Rethink how to build capabilities at scale. The current leadership team should create personalized immersion sessions for new leaders. The most senior executives should lead these courses rather than having them administered by HR or delivered through self-driven courses. Senior leaders should compare notes with future leaders, get them to open up about their biggest challenges, and jointly determine how to address them. Lessons can come from anywhere in the business ecosystem. A large part of Wendy Kopp’s success with Teach for All, for instance, was her willingness to trust partners around the world. Her organization established a clear set of unifying leadership principles (such as a commitment to shared purpose, theory of change, values, and vision). Then it established a network of partners and trainings that leaders could use to learn from one another and apply lessons in their own countries and contexts. “There’s such power in fostering grassroots efforts while also helping people gain global exposure,” she says.10 Other leadership factories should take heed.
- Lead self before others. Current leaders should invest time and energy to help new and aspiring leaders manage themselves and operate at their personal best. Feedback is a critical starting point for self-improvement. Retired US Navy Admiral Eric Olson discovered as much when he led the US Special Operations Command, overseeing a group of warriors not known for wearing their emotions on their sleeves. As Olson told the authors of The Journey of Leadership: How CEOs Learn to Lead from the Inside Out (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, September 2024), he went on a nine-month listening tour of the soldiers and found some emotional “fraying around the edges.”11 The feedback prompted Olson and his team to change some policies, prioritize resources, and create more support (such as from nutritionists, physical therapists, and psychologists). They aimed to improve the cohesion, effectiveness, and morale of Navy SEALs and their families—because health and readiness all start at home.
- Empower leaders to build their own personalized, self-driven learning journeys. Organizations should provide modules on a range of leadership topics, including leading self, leading teams, leading organizations, and using technology to do all three. Ongoing, candid feedback from peers and team members will again be critical. It will help raise new leaders’ self-awareness, prompt their journey toward self-correction, and create development and mentoring opportunities across the organization.
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