Understand how a data platform works and what it means in hotels and restaurants today.
Alfredo Lamadrid*
It would be very difficult to understand today in retrospect the speed of exponential growth in recent years of data, now available to hotels and restaurants With certainty it can be said that future technologies will depend even more on the veracity of the data and that the integrations of systems and platforms will be more powerful and inevitable for all players.
I can tell you, no matter what you call yourself and how big you are as a manufacturer of solutions in data platforms, you will have to play by these rules, which are what the hospitality industry demands.
The need for a reliable system to collect and connect all existing data for hotels has become inevitable. Entering the era of data platforms is the next level. Isolated PMS & POS are destined to die, but what does that mean and how does it work for hotels?
Let's get a little bit into the details of the data. It seems an unknown and distant language for all outsiders to IT, but it is really not so complicated to be able to immerse themselves in these topics. Data analytics, data intelligence, harmonized data, big data. We've all heard of the infinite facets and grouping names of data, but data is essentially useless or of very little integrity unless it is properly stored, intelligently related to the various parties, and made available to users and other systems.
Yes, we can see and store the data, but if we don't understand it, we are missing out on a world of opportunities and, in turn, benefits. Without the technology to gather all the data in one easily accessible location, the data becomes this animal that we can never tame and control. Once you master this simple concept and principle of data, it will make more sense to you what it means together from all this and you can start thinking beyond the PMS and the POS, out of the question these two systems are the beginning of this journey through the data.
Now, what is a data platform? is the combination and coexistence of all data from various datasets and acts as a centralized repository that can be accessed for analysis and integrations. A hotel data platform collects data from multiple systems (PMS, POS, Channel Manager, Website Analytics, Backoffice, and much more), harmonizes it into usable and uniform structures, and provides managed applications to access data in an organized and functional way.
If we could have at a discussion and debate table, a significant diversity of hospitality industry professionals outside of the IT people, all or most of them would quite possibly agree that disjointed information is strongly hampering the growth of the sector, due to the decentralized nature inherited from the hotel and restaurant business.
There is a lack of integrations between the numerous hotels or timeshares, systems and channels that we use throughout the industry around the world. While all industries are riddled with silos of data or isolated data, the hospitality industry seems to be the least integrated across all service verticals and we have yet to develop platforms to bring everything together, which is where a data platform comes into play.
But I guarantee you that today the evolution in development in data platform is much more advanced than you think and know. I recommend you take a look outside the box and you will be surprised to find companies that are immersed in this mission and you should not necessarily look outside of Latam or Mexico, you will find really disruptive options and break the idea that the brands and products of companies from the United States or global are the best option.
So, with all this context and understanding, it might be easier to understand what a data platform is and looking at this from another perspective we could look at it differently. Let's talk a little bit about what it is not. A data platform is not just a copy of your existing data on some on-premises servers or in the cloud. That would be a backup system or a data lake.
A data platform differs widely when data enters the platform, is structurally improved to harmonize it between the various data it enters, then becomes a uniform and comparable data pool when it needs to exit.
For example, in a hotel, you can have multiple ways to name room categories, which makes it increasingly difficult to compare the performance of suites, doubles, singles, etc. In a data platform, such information has been harmonized to facilitate its analysis of the information.
In other words, a data platform allows multiple independent hotels or hotels to access and work with data quickly, without the need to make the relationships and harmonizations every time exports are extracted and manipulated manually.
How do data platforms work in hotels and restaurants?
Data today more than ever takes on a different relevance, it is of utmost importance for any modern company, but the way companies see it and what you decide to do with it makes all the difference. I think that for hotels and restaurants data is a fundamental tool for operations and can be divided into several segments, big data, small data, structured data and unstructured data.
The difference and understanding of the different types of data will lead you to the distinction of the multiple types. At that point you can start applying your data insights to improve the performance of your hote or restaurant.
*Alfredo Lamadrid Alducin is Managing Partner of Hostec Mexico & United States and Managing Director of PDT Hospitality Guest.
