Many hospitality brands rely on guest identity data to provide specialized offers and premium recommendations. Guests crave this kind of personalization; 61% of consumers reported that they would pay more to have a customized experience. Even so, a mere 23% of consumers shared that their last hotel stay had “high levels of personalization.”

Looking at this data, a question emerges: Where is the disconnect? The answer most commonly lies in siloed data; guest information that winds up disorganized and fragmented across countless touch points, solutions, and operational departments. The result is inaccurate identity data, frustrated guests, inefficient internal operations, stalled profits, and even compliance risks. 

Here’s what you need to know about data silos, the benefits of a unified data platform in the hospitality industry, and how you can maximize the potential of your brand’s data from every source.

The Dangers of Data Silos

Data silos can create all sorts of inefficiencies in any industry, but they can be especially problematic in the hospitality sector. Why? They limit your team’s ability to make the most of this data, manage your daily operations, and make smart business decisions—but most importantly, because these silos can prevent you from having access to the data you need to deliver the best possible guest experience.

When data is siloed, your teams can’t access all relevant data they need regarding your guests between departments—and as a result, you lose out on the opportunity to leverage the power of this information to deliver more personalized guest experiences.

How do data silos hinder hospitality?

• Incomplete data, which can result in your team developing strategies and decisions without using all the available data.
• Inconsistent data, which means different teams might be working from different customer data sets, leading to discrepancies between departments, less-than-stellar guest experiences, and other potential customer service issues.
• Inefficient, duplicated processes, which can add to your overall IT costs. Data silos not only mean you need more servers and more data storage (and higher spending), but you may also find that siloed operations and systems deployed and managed by different teams can lead to inefficient operations, duplicated work, and other redundancies.
• Inhibited collaboration, which can happen when different departments are working with separate data sources, limiting the opportunity to work together to deliver a unified, cohesive guest experience, like between your marketing and customer service teams, for example.

Why a Unified Data Platform Makes Sense in the Hospitality Industry

Most of today’s hospitality brands have all sorts of communication touchpoints to attract and connect with guests—and while each of these solutions has its own complex ecosystem, they can also provide a wealth of data.

When these data sources are isolated, they may not amount to much. However, brought together by a unified data platform, your marketing, sales, customer support, internal operations, and financial teams have access to the data needed to deliver the best possible guest experiences and make the most informed business decisions.

With a unified data platform, you wind up with a full picture of your entire brand and every guest touchpoint and interaction. This equates to better predictive analytics, both for your brand as a whole and for individual guests, and in response, every team member company-wide has a better understanding of each guest, enabling them to provide a more personalized experience, ultimately driving brand loyalty.

Unified data analytics tie closely into robust, AI-driven solutions like predictive analytics and ChatGPT, empowering your team to:

• Reduce manual effort for repetitive or simple tasks, freeing up your team for more complicated work.
• Identify key trends both by source (like a mobile app or social media account) and as a whole.
• Optimize—and customize—promotions and guest recommendations for a better ROI.
• Improve customer segmentation for more targeted campaigns and employ more effective cross-channel marketing campaigns.
• Address guest concerns quickly and efficiently with a higher level of customer satisfaction.

Building a Unified Data Platform

Hospitality brands have data pouring in from all kinds of sources—social media, CRM solutions, mobile apps, websites, and more. To harness the full potential of all this data, it can’t remain fragmented in different siloes; data from all these channels, solutions, and platforms has to work together in a more unified data infrastructure.

How do you make this happen? Here are the essential steps on the journey toward a unified data platform:

1. Take inventory of your current data sources

What does your data landscape look like today? You have data streaming in from everywhere—your internal systems, any third-party solutions you use, all the different touchpoints your guests encounter, your customer relationship management tool, and any other channels you employ—to understand the quality, consistency, and scale of your data at present

2. Outline your data governance requirements

In the hospitality sector, your brand deals with a great deal of regulated and personally identifiable data. Your brand should outline your data governance policies and procedures to address how you plan to collect, store, and use this data to keep it protected across your entire digital footprint.

3. Choose a data integration solution that maximizes what you can do with guest data

Today’s consumers have come to expect customized experiences both online and in real life, and the hospitality sector is no exception. According to a recent study, 78% of travelers stated that they would be more likely to stay with a hotel or property that delivered a personalized experience.

 A data integration system that can bring all of an individual’s data together in one place—even linking anonymous online activity to existing customer profiles and offering individualized recommendations based on past experiences, cross-channel data, and predictive analytics—can help make full use of this data.

4. Select a unified data platform that detects and addresses errors for you

When your hospitality brand uses data to make informed decisions, the quality of that data is of the utmost importance—especially when it comes to identity data. Even so, 77% of organizations report data quality issues, and 91% of these organizations shared that these challenges were impacting their performance. 

You should choose an identity data platform that monitors all of your data sources; one that seeks out errors, alerts you to potential issues (including potential sources of risk and PII breaches), and has tools in place to resolve any discrepancies.

5. Go with a unified data platform that seamlessly connects with your cloud-based data warehouse

All of your data should exist in a centralized location; a repository like a data warehouse or data lake that houses and organizes all the structured and unstructured data coming in from every source. Choose a secure, cloud-based data platform that is scalable and flexible enough to meet your evolving needs and budget, and acts as a single source of truth for your analyses. 

6. Opt for an identity data platform that easily syncs with your existing system of solutions

A unified identity data platform is only useful when it makes your work simpler, not harder. You need a solution that will connect with your existing data sources out of the box and one that will help you manage these connections over time. Additionally, your data platform should allow you to examine what the data from all of these sources means with real-time analytics.

harpin AI: A Supercharged Identity Data Platform Solution Eliminates Silos on Day 1

Your hospitality brand deserves better than disorganized, inaccurate, and siloed data. Bring your data together with a unified platform and eliminate work silos on Day 1 with harpin AI.

Our proprietary AI/ML tools, algorithms, and a team of data quality experts pre-process your data in real-time, resulting in more accurate, accessible, and actionable entity data—which will directly enable you to personalize and improve your customer experience, eliminate call center chaos, and increase ROI with more efficient operations. 

What does this look like? 

• Cohesive, accurate, and compliant entity data and entity profiles for a deeper understanding of your brand’s individual customers and guest market segments.
• Support to identify and address the root cause of data issues for analytics your brand can count on, as well as cleaner data to boost your ROI by as much as 40%.
• Continuous filtering of data through our AI/ML tools and algorithms to validate identity data in real time so you can make faster, data-driven decisions.
• Robust security and reduced risk of compliance violations and reputation-damaging breaches.
• Simple integration thanks to 1,000+ pre-build connectors to make data ingestion and mapping simple, so you’re ready to maximize the potential of your brand’s identity data in hours, not days or weeks.

100% of our harpin AI partners see results within 3 weeks. Want to discover firsthand what this can mean for your hospitality brand? Book a demo today!