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How Hotels Are Using Big Data To Help Guests Feel At Home

IBM

By Billy Turchin, Head of CRM & Customer Experience for InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG)

When most people think about the holiday shopping season, data and analytics are probably not the first things that come to mind. Images of long lines at the mall, holiday packages piling up at your doorstep and memories of quality time with family and friends are more likely. With so many people traveling around the holidays, this presents a significant opportunity for global hotel companies, such as InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), to play a part in creating those memories. Doing this well requires putting relationships at the heart of everything we do and the key to it all comes down to better understanding our customers.

So where do data and analytics fit into the holiday experience? Everywhere. Our ability to unlock new data-driven insights is at the core of our commitment to building lifelong relationships with our guests and being the top choice for travelers worldwide.

Throughout most of the year, hotel companies see lots of demand from business travelers. But during the holidays, business travelers take fewer trips and stay closer to home. In place of these road warriors, there is an uptick in infrequent leisure travelers who might not have a loyalty to any specific hotel brand or even use hotel loyalty programs.

Well-established hotel brands with a strong reputation for consistent quality continue to be fundamental to a traveler’s final booking decision, but we’ve also found that price is the key hotel booking criteria for most leisure travelers. Through advanced analytics, we’re able to understand other important factors that influence leisure travelers’ hotel choices. For example, is breakfast complimentary? Do kids eat free? Does the hotel room have a sleeper sofa? Does the hotel offer a swimming pool or other family-related needs and activities? Are pets welcome? Is the hotel room fully refundable in case of bad weather or other travel issues? These benefits can matter even more during the holidays.

With many variables playing into a holiday travel decision, it’s critical that we, as a hospitality company, understand the unique needs of each traveler, enabling us to deliver the right offer at the right time on the right communication channel. Today, IHG leverages a rich enterprise data warehouse, where we store vast amounts of data that our customers have shared with us, to help us personalize our guests’ stays with us during the holidays and at any time of the year.

A large portion of IHG’s guests book their hotel room through our direct channels such as on our IHG App, or through our IHG.com website, so we have a tremendous opportunity to further amplify this personalization with customers. We do this through IBM’s Smarter Commerce portfolio. The tool helps us take advantage of a nearly endless array of data points on each guest and helps us to build a personalized engagement roadmap based on their past interactions and travel preferences.

The tool also helps IHG personalize the guest experience during the holidays in many ways. Each traveler represents a unique combination of criteria and preferences that only analytics can unlock. This combination may include staying at IHG hotels, downloading the IHG App and fulfilling other relevant offers personalized for that guest. One guest may be interested in exploring different brands while another is content to stick with the tried-and-true.

This same personalization is later applied as the relationship between IHG and our guests continues to grow. While one guest may be interested in an international vacation of a lifetime, another may be more interested in electronics or concert tickets. For example, IHG recently launched a marketing campaign called “Into the Nights,” which offers members of IHG® Rewards Club; IHG’s free hotel rewards program, the opportunity to earn free hotel nights and bonus points.

To manage these variances, we constantly feed results back into our systems and adjust the offers to serve up what that guest values the most. Some members may get a bonus offer to earn a free night for staying with us during the holidays. There are literally more than 500,000 possible combinations of travel behaviors and loyalty program interactions that determine how a member can earn rewards.

This deep level of personalization is particularly important during the holidays where what we do through data, along with how we treat our guests, can create cherished memories that will last a lifetime. Every guest interaction during the holidays is a prime chance to create a life-long guest who will come back time and time again.

The key is balancing personalized experiences at each point in the guest journey, whether it’s during the check-in process or presenting compelling offers that our guests can use during their next stay. The way to find that balance is by using data to uncover what has worked in the past and adjust to new conditions in real time to achieve the optimal experience for each guest.

For this holiday and every other day, at IHG, getting to know the guest is essential. By tapping into the data they share with us, we can successfully deliver the items on their travel “wish list” for each and every stay.