Читать книгу Big Data - Challenges for the Hospitality Industry - Michael Toedt - Страница 5

Customer Data is the salt of our modern times.

In medieval times, merchants in the Mediterranean accumulated extreme wealth by trading in spices such as salt. Nowadays, the prosperity of a company strongly correlates with its ability to manage and use customer data. Data management can help to differentiate products and services from those of competitors and thus make a company far more competitive and profitable.

Data can also be used to enhance existing and create new products and services (co-creation), to market the right services at the right time through the right channels, and to provide a personalized and individualized service at the different points of interaction and sale.

The increasing use of social media and the continuous digitalization lead to the creation of an enormous amount of data. And the data volume will grow exponentially. This phenomenon is referred to as “Big Data”.

Experts agree that the phenomenon of Big Data will have a significant impact on the structure of organizations and the way companies will work and interact with their customers. Especially since 2011, the interest in the topic is soaring. The follow figure shows the searches on Google for the topic “Big Data” since 2007.

Figure 1: Search for "Big Data" on Google[1]

Nevertheless, many managers and organizations are still not aware of this fact, or they fail to implement the changes that are required to leverage Big Data.

Due to the lack of competence and knowledge about modern marketing tools combined with insufficient IT understanding within the senior management most hotel companies fail to generate value from the enormous amount of available customer data.

Today, customer data is collected in data silos, which sit in the different departments and are not connected. In the past decade IT decisions were mainly driven by Operations and not based on an overall marketing consumer strategy.

The heart of Big Data is to provide added value to the customer. Thus, it seems logical that the marketing department should take the lead in Big Data initiatives. This, however, requires profound analytical skills and technology understanding from marketing managers, as well as additional competences and responsibilities.

The use of Big Data can positively influence the quality of marketing initiatives and interaction with customers. The quality of marketing within a Big Data environment goes beyond appealing design. It is characterized by a real-time content delivery process, which provides offers and information to the recipients based on their individual needs.

For a hotel Big Data can help to push direct distribution which can result in higher profit margins. Hotels should start using Big Data in order to counter-act the loss of business to costly third-party websites. Big Data can help to secure the competitive advantage and to increase profitability by up to 100%.

The biggest obstacles are the lack of expertise within the senior management and the reluctance to implement the necessary technical, organizational, structural and HR changes.

This book gives an evaluation of the significance of Big Data for the hospitality industry and describes the key areas for successful implementation. It is addressed to both academic researchers as well as hotel operators.