Hotel & Travel industry is a very competitive sector where potential customers have a variety of options to choose from. Therefore, it is essential to find effective ways to utilize tons of data for acquiring and then retaining guests. This is where analytics comes into play and has now boundless opportunities in expanding and completely changing how the business is run. Among others, the major challenge faced is attracting new customers, keeping them satisfied throughout their stay, and encouraging them to return.
In this digital era, people prefer booking their rooms online. They consider reviews & recommendations on various online portals as a key factor for selecting their hotel as per their preferences. Understanding segment behavior, needs, and expectations are vital for providing great customer experience and service. Taking these deep reviews into consideration and applying artificial intelligence to them can exponentially improve business growth.
One of our clients is a leading hospitality chain with several properties across North America. They wanted to understand their customers better and make strategic decisions to increase customer base, satisfaction and retention. This would help in increasing revenue and winning against their competitors. As part of the solution, they wanted to entitle the hotel managers to understand the key issues based on these reviews.
Our team helped the client increase business across their chain of hotels by leveraging analytics to transform unstructured data into actionable insights. We gathered customer data across the clients’ hotel chains and combined this with customer feedback reviews on partner travel portals like TripAdvisor, Expedia, etc. We used deep learning-based topic modeling techniques to determine what components of a guest’s stay were addressed in the reviews. A taxonomy was prepared that included different categories like location, amenities, food, service, property type, etc., and their subcategories which acted as the basis of the analysis.
For understanding the customer ratings and experience, we analyzed the sentiment on the topics & sub-topics by applying machine learning algorithms. The team further attributed this data with geospatial and revenue data from other sources to compare with the competitors to draw out a comparative analysis.
The solution was deployed using Spark & insights were fed into QlikView dashboards which empowered the hotel managers. This helped them in more visibility of their property, and how they are faring against their competitors.
In one of the instances, as shown above, we noticed that one of their competitors with newer properties started to outperform them in a short period of time. Our insights were able to identify the cause, therefore, letting them take corrective measures.
Based on the collective intelligence from these insights, it helped the decision-makers to improve the services as per their guests’ feedback. Thereby, aiding in higher Lifetime Value (LTV) of customers & acquiring customers from competitors.
This is one of the ways analytics has helped in hospitality management. There are many more applications that can leverage the potential of analytics, such as pricing, segmentation/targeting, personalizing products & services, revenue and investment management, etc. If utilized in the right way, data analytics can have a major impact in revolutionizing the hotel industry, like how our team successfully managed to enhance customer services through advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and empowered hoteliers to make better-informed decisions.
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