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Whether it’s used for understanding guests' habits, analyzing TripAdvisor reviews, or improving service times, data is the new key to staying ahead. In the fiercely competitive world of hospitality, gathering, analyzing, and reacting to data can have a huge impact on not just a hotel’s bottom line, but its reputation as well. In an effort to help our peers compete, we here at Alice interviewed some of New York City’s leading GMs on the importance of data as it relates to the running of their hotel. This is part one of eight. You can download the full report here. Whether it’s used for understanding guests' habits, analyzing TripAdvisor reviews, or improving service times to shave precious minutes off each task, data is the new key to staying ahead. Almost every industry is supported by software today and if a business doesn’t have a deep understanding of their operation, their customers, and their competitors, it will be hard to survive, let alone thrive. In the hospitality industry, competition is as fierce as it has ever been thanks to the constant influx of supply as well as the ever-increasing optionality from the sharing economy. The ability to collect, analyze, and react to data can have a huge impact on not just a hotel’s bottom line, but on its reputation as well. Yet hotels are struggling to effectively use data. We often hear complaints that the data is not actionable; that it’s difficult to pull out of a system; that it’s fragmented and only paints a small piece of the total picture; or that there is simply too much of it. More alarming is that we are only at the beginning of the data-driven technology generation. The digital universe, which encompasses all the data we create and copy, doubles in size every two years and by 2020 is expected to reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes. With the realization that there’s so much yet to come in the world of data, Alice recently interviewed several hoteliers that we work with to understand how they are currently utilizing data in their hotels and learn what needs improvement when it comes to hotel data analysis. In our report, we cover... The three metrics all of our GMs wished they had more data about, and how they’re making the most of the information they have. Examples of data “breadcrumbs” that guests are leaving behind, and how you can use them to identify which drive the most revenue. How social media can be a highly useful way of learning about your guests, improving your scores and increasing corporate bookings. Our predictions around the future of the data-driven hotel. Now, before we dive in, let’s be clear that we are not here presenting a magic formula that will solve all of your hotel data challenges. But what we do hope is that by having a thought-provoking discussion of the opportunities and obstacles that hoteliers face with data in today’s fast-paced industry, we can start a positive feedback loop that will give hoteliers a significant competitive advantage over those who are slower to embrace data’s many benefits.