Why Simple in Travel Can Be So Much Better Than Big Data

Walk through any airport or city center, and you’re surrounded with nebulous sounding ads touting the benefit of big data and the power of the cloud. In fact, in the span of researching this column, I was targeted relentlessly with programmatic ads that followed me around the Internet for several days. But, despite these urgent calls to action and aggressive targeting, I would assert that, for large swaths of the hospitality industry, sometimes simple is all you need to start with. And you probably don’t have as much data as you think you have. My last column talked about how the Park Hyatt in Tokyo over delivered with a simple data point: knowing I was arriving in the early morning. There was no need