Deanne Branham
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Balancing the economics of hotel costs, room availability, and services with revenue expectations today is a minute-by-minute competition as travelers increasingly seek the best deals and available rooms in real-time. Winning the hearts and minds of customers means hospitality brands must have access to trusted, accurate data that enables them to make informed decisions and deliver personalized experiences instantly.
As Hospitality Technology reports, rising costs have led enterprise clients to control expenses by negotiating rates with long lead times, while everyday travelers have become increasingly spontaneous, booking rooms only a week to 10 days before arriving.
Balancing the economics of hotels
So how do they better personalize to secure guests and keep them returning time and time again? Data.
The hotel and hospitality industry requires vast amounts of data across an organization to personalize guest experience and maximize efficiency. However, data sets can quickly become outdated, siloed, and inaccessible to all employees who need them. Hotels catering to individual and corporate guests must match up-to-date information on their facilities and availability with their guests’ established rates and preferences. This data is fundamental for any hotel today, but many information management systems cannot keep pace with the exponential growth of data or the number of people who need immediate access to it.
Imagine the current data needs of just a single hotel offering booking services, guest accommodations, and conference rooms to thousands of people every day. Then multiply those services across hundreds of locations and tens of millions of customers. Next, factor in remaining competitive in markets worldwide where discerning customers are searching for the best rooms, deals, and personalized services.
A global hospitality leader pivots to its data for an edge
As it approached its 65th anniversary, Radisson Hotel Group (RHG) faced that global-scale data challenge: Today, it has more than 1,380 hotels in operation and under development across the world, with more than 70,000 employees supporting 50 million customers. And its competitors are no longer the same hotel chains it has competed with for decades—newer digital-native entrants, such as Airbnb, are attracting large followings with their customer-friendly approach.
On any given day, data can change in a million ways from a thousand different touchpoints. Simply managing that data would be a massive challenge for any hospitality organization, even one with decades of expertise and a passion for understanding and serving customers. Recognizing that its data was fragmented and siloed across 15 operational and reporting systems, RHG sought a unified, single source of truth that spanned its hotels and customers.
Resolving and connecting fragmented data
RHG’s growing international footprint and siloed data systems created serious data challenges. Without a centralized database or consistent processes across its hotels, different parts of the business relied on different datasets without a single source of truth. These challenges have become common across industries: As Amazon’s AWS team notes, large volumes of data are often a barrier to data modernization, as are complex legacy systems that can create interoperability issues and inconsistent data.
From an internal standpoint, the lack of a solution that unifies and standardizes data across sources meant that RHG employees needed assistance finding data—and if a data expert wasn’t immediately available, an answer might take two or three days to receive. It needed a more efficient solution: one that would significantly reduce data preparation, processing, and location time, freeing its teams for more value-added work.
Adding to the pressure—the lack of centralized data created challenges in offering the best possible customer experiences: Customer and even hotel details might be located in old spreadsheets that were no longer accurate or in siloed databases that couldn’t be quickly checked when customers inquired about guest or conference room bookings. This incomplete view of Radisson hotels and customers—combined with limited governance and unclear ownership—contributed to a lack of internal trust in its data and disjointed customer experiences.
Building a single source of truth with accurate and frequently updated hotel, location, and customer data would enable better experiences and increased satisfaction, making it easier for customers to choose the hotel with the desired amenities. Moreover, it would reduce waste of resources, automate previously manual processes, and improve its global ability to track negotiated pricing rates and offer discounts, all while providing superior data for analytics and decision-making.
Empowering Radisson’s non-technical users
To replace multiple application-level MDM tools, RHG selected a cloud-based AI-fueled data management solution as the foundation for its transformation. Radisson needed an intuitive, user-friendly interface that empowers business users to get value from their data without relying on technical teams. This solution provided robust integration capabilities, including a low-code/no-code environment and API-led options. These capabilities enabled their OneMDM to connect RHG’s 15 existing systems: everything from ERP, content management, and revenue management to BI and analytics, CRM, marketing, third-party data providers, data lake, data warehouse, relational databases, and message queues.
Radisson had planned for a multi-phase rollout, during which it would add data domains as needed for both current requirements and future growth. By using a cloud-native MDM solution, its domain upgrades require zero downtime and can scale with its customers’ demands.
Radisson started with hotel and location data, improving data quality by 30% and streamlining more than 30 processes for maintaining hotel data. This has increased employee efficiency while delivering more accurate and current facility information.
Next, it added B2B customer data, including corporate profiles, travel agencies, and vendors, along with the relationships across the entities. Today, Radisson has a “golden record” for each customer, enabling it to confidently offer guests the right services and rates for their needs.
What’s next: Expanding from B2B to B2C
Radisson started with business customers, building consistent, personalized profiles using a combination of opted-in data and organizational information from Dun & Bradstreet.
As Nouman Ali, RHG’s senior director of global governance & MDM, explained, OneMDM is “not just helping us improve our operations, but also helping our customers get better services from us as well.” By truly understanding our customers and meeting them where they are, we can increase loyalty, utilization of our facilities, and revenue.
“Now we have a clean list of our customers, which helps our sales and business development teams to have better visibility, including their revenue and our contracts,” says Ali. “Up-to-date data enables better negotiations with those customers.” Better yet, OneMDM makes RHG’s data trusted and interoperable – shared with all channel-facing systems in real-time – to support sales analytics and process optimization.
Customer-facing benefits will continue to grow. Hospitality Net notes that guests now expect AI-powered personalization to work seamlessly with human hospitality to improve their hotel stays. Since AI depends on trustworthy customer data, RHG’s next step will be to apply learnings from the B2B process to build accurate and comprehensive B2C guest profiles. In addition, increasing the relevance and resonance of RHG’s marketing campaigns will help hotel staff better anticipate guest needs and deliver more enjoyable experiences, increasing everyday travelers’ loyalty and revenues.
Even when confronted with a global data challenge, RHG has strategically used trusted, unified, high-quality data and new technology to quickly make incredible progress. By moving in stages, Radisson Hotel Group has steadily managed large amounts of data, linked legacy systems to a modern hub, and empowered business users to enhance customer experiences and revenue while ensuring future growth.
Deanne is Chief Customer Officer of Reltio. She oversees and manages global professional services, customer engineering, customer success organizations, and the overall customer experience. Deanne has over 20 years of experience in data management. Before joining Reltio, she held key sales and leadership positions in professional services and customer success and engagement, accumulating extensive knowledge in developing and implementing customer-centric strategies. During her tenure at Reltio, Deanne has held leadership positions across functions, including alliances, product management, enablement, professional services, and customer success. Deanne holds a BS degree in Computer Information Systems from DeVry University.
