August 10, 2016
The hospitality industry is being faced with varied challenges in the present scenario like an exponential increase in the volume, velocity, and variety of the data. The changing global economic conditions and the evolution of the distribution network are some of the major challenges that must be addressed by hospitality firms to survive in this highly competitive marketplace.
Over 32,000 restaurants participated in Hospitality Technology’s ‘2016 Restaurant Technology Study’. According to the reports, 87% of respondents replied that their top drive to fund tech projects was the desire to improve operational/process efficiency by using data visualization.
The Key Challenges Being Faced by the Hospitality Industry
The global trends that are impacting the hospitality industry in the present scenario include:
- Fastest fastest-growing customer segment expecting technology for check-in, payments, etc.
- Multiple data sources
- Emerging growth markets
- Guest profiling according to their preferences
- Manual data entries
- The ever-growing demands of the customers
- Working towards increasing the revenue and lowering the cost.
- Data duplication, human error, and lack of efficiency.
How can Data Visualization address the challenges faced by the Hospitality Industry?
- Improve Customer Loyalty by enhancing Customer Experience
By collecting data about a customer hospitality firms can use data visualization techniques to obtain the most relevant and meaningful data from it such as which services are most availed by the customers, the most ordered food items, etc.
- Cost and Capacity Optimization
By keeping a systematic record of their data, the hotel owners will be able to learn which services generating maximum revenue for their firm and which of the areas are lagging. Hospitality firms must make use of data visualization methodologies to avoid financial loss to make more dynamic pricing decisions and also to optimize their capacity planning.
- Formulating Marketing Strategies
Forecasting and formulating new business strategies and making decisions for business growth are some of the major areas where the hotel owners can benefit from data visualization techniques.
Visually appealing reports which are generated using the data visualization techniques are easy to understand. These reports can be easily navigated to explore the business and learn about the performance of the organization. This aids in forecasting the business and also in formulating strategies for the future.
By making use of data visualization, hospitality firms devise the best marketing strategies for each of their target segment. For example, by finding out that a specific target group spends an average of thirty hours on social media; the firm can formulate their marketing strategies by making use of social media channels.
Data Visualization Techniques and Methodologies Being Used in Hospitality Industry
- Grid computing and parallel processing: The calculations are split making it easier to solve a bunch of problems by bringing them in a parallel sequence.
- In-database processing: The analytics run in the database so that the data need not be moved out of the database for computing thereby reducing the time of processing.
- In-memory processing: Enough memory is being added to hold big data sets for faster reporting.
- Using a Histogram to Reduce Costs
- A time series or a run chart
By making use of data visualization and business intelligence techniques, hospitality firms can gain intelligent information from the data which is being generated at different locations and departments. Data visualization techniques will not only help in gaining visibility into the business but also help in finding opportunities for its growth.