Expectations are rising that data should be easy to access at no or low cost. Publicly available datasets, APIs, and open data initiatives have contributed to this perception.
The travel and hospitality industry generates vast amounts of data, some of it freely available. However, there are obviously degrees of granularity. Anonymised and generic datasets are likely to be free, while datasets that include detailed and commercially sensitive information will come at a price.
As AI applications gain traction, hotel revenue managers see the potential of greater data sharing and collaboration as a positive development.
Deniel Frey, VP revenue management, H-Hotels.com, commented: “I've been pushing in the last few years, especially for our revenue management system (RMS) to integrate more data from the outside, from partners like the OTAs, from Amadeus, from STR, and to just let the data play and not to be protective about the algorithm and the core functionality. “
He added: “We are quite protective in our industry. Not only the hotels, also our partners, distributors, and systems. Nobody's really sharing data [for free]. That's all. I've got it. And I can provide the data to you and you have to pay for it. That's how it works. It's not fed into anywhere. So it's about being open to sharing data as much as possible.”
Alexander Gevers Deynoot, VP global accounts & Hopper Technology Solutions, Hopper, added: “The global hotel brands keep their cards so close to their chests and I think there's still so much opportunity to collaborate.”
Organisations like STR and HotStats offer hotel performance data through different models.
CoStar Group, a provider of online real estate information and analytics, acquired STR in 2019 and Fairmas Benchmarking, a German hospitality benchmarking product, in 2022.
Hopper, the third largest OTA in the US, says it has disrupted its market by accessing superior flight data. It uses eight years of historical data, over 70 trillion data points and proprietary machine learning algorithms to predict future flight and hotel prices. The flight data is supplied by OAG. Three years ago, Hopper started white labelling its travel booking technology to several companies including Uber and Capital One.
Deynoot said: “Younger generations are ditching the OTAs and they're booking travel within their banking ecosystem. And if that trend continues, that's quite interesting because loyalty with banks is way greater than loyalty with anybody else.”
Moniker Moser, chief technology officer, BWH Hotels Scandinavia, added that her young team members have the easiest relationship with the latest RMS technology: “Gen Z are just so comfortable with systems. They're not even thinking about: ‘Oh the system might take away my job.’ They just use it. They use the smart tools and really work it to get the best out of it.”
Moser said this generational shift is making it easier for revenue management (RM) principles and strategies to be deployed across hotel departments, rather than being the sole preserve of a separate RM team.
Bani Haddad, founder and managing director, Aleph Hospitality, agreed on the importance of making everyone in the hotel responsible for RM strategy: “In this transition phase, until AI takes over, when every head of department really owns his or her P&L, this is when you start seeing improvements.”
Some are more impatient than others to see artificial intelligence fully automate RMS. Frey said: “I don’t want to make the decisions. I want the system to make the decisions based on the data it’s receiving. Yes, I want it to be completely automated.”
If more hotels ingest the same data and use the same automated systems to manage their demand and their pricing, a key question arises: if everyone is acting in the same way, where is the commercial or the competitive advantage?
In this context, the revenue manager’s job spec must change. Moser said: “The easy tasks or the optimisation tasks will be taken care of by technology going forward. The revenue manager role will become broader, and it'll be lifted more to the strategic level, like commercial business development. Identifying the right strategies and applying them.”
All quotes taken from the IHIF Berlin 2024 panel: ‘Revolutionizing Revenue: Strategies for Revenue Management in the Modern Hospitality Landscape.’