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Explore with us where the travel industry is headed, technologically. The time has come to look at what the future holds for hospitality, and every travel vertical, as an industry that uses digital tools to better reach customers — and re-envisions itself along the way.

This sponsored content was created in collaboration with a Skift partner.

If you know the history of what a traveler likes and prefers, and what they buy, book, and reserve based on those preferences, you can fill their journeys with moments of relevance, surprise, and delight, while further differentiating your brand.

That is key to the mission when it comes to connected hospitality strategies in the data analytics age. Technology is giving travel operations and marketing new ways to identify best practices, market trends and patterns whilst shaping the guest experiences around proven models.

In the following sections we look at examples of how data is putting analytics and actionable moments in the hands of travel industry leaders — both on-site and behind-the-scenes, one guest at a time.

Defining Hospitality’s Future: The Data Dashboard and Guest Interactions

For the travel industry, digital dashboards help operations and marketing identify and act on the data every consumer generates, every leg of their trip. The power to visualize, prompt, and convert based on guest data is proving to be an increasingly critical lens. Gaining ease of access to the data provides the opportunity to predict an event before it happens, saving costs by making operations a more streamlined and effective system overall.

Hotels such as citizenM, for example, are able to implement intelligent software that links disparate hotel systems — from booking to housekeeping — into one centralized, visualized interactive ecosystem. From there, website data, room-control information — everything an operations team needs to shape rewarding guest experiences — exists at staff members’ fingertips.
The Ops and Marketing Intersect: Data Drives Actionable Moments

Travel ops and marketing are coming together around shareable insights and on-property opportunities as well. Business intelligence software at Holland America Line, a 140-year old cruise line now operating under Carnival, is driving new insights around the revenue-generating performance of its ships’ various venues and onboard activities.

Connecting all the lines options into a central, visualizable ecosystem gives Holland America a powerful ops and marketing advantage. It allows the cruise line to identify best practices on the operational level, key moments that marketing can then use to showcase the most desirable features of the line’s packages to future travelers. It’s about connecting the guest experience to the operations experience, and then looping marketing into that mix.

“We can tell the story from a guest’s perspective or from a revenue perspective and find out how to replicate that success on other ships,” says Seth Brickman, director of Onboard Revenue and Analytics for the organization.

Putting these tools directly into the hands of ops and marketing experts, Brickman adds, means allowing teams to query new ideas and substantiate new strategies at something close to the speed of thought. Part of the power of connected hospitality, then, lies in its real-time capabilities.

The Big Picture: From Shaping Experiences to Connected Hospitality, the Future is About Relationships

This article is the second in a series of looks at how technology is transforming the hospitality sector.

In the previous installment, Redefining Hospitality With Digital Tools for the Travel Industry, we looked at how virtual reality, mobile devices, and data are shaping real-time passenger and guest experiences. In the next installment of this series, read about how digital technology is changing the face of customer relationship management for the travel industry.

Explore with us where the travel industry is headed, technologically. The time has come to look at what the future holds for hospitality, and every travel vertical, as an industry uses digital tools to better reach customers — and re-envisions itself along the way.

This content is created collaboratively in partnership with our sponsor Microsoft.

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Tags: citizenm, data, hospitality, microsoft

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