The“ How Data Powers the Future of Hotel Operations” roundtable was held during HITEC in San Antonio. From left: Nick Clark, Remington Hospitality; Chris Cheney, Stonebridge; Lauren Lontine, Otelier; Matthew Bright, Davidson Hospitality; David Eisen, HOTELS; Dana Cariss, CoralTree; James Wilson, OUTRIGGER; Russ Meek, Otelier; Tim Thilleman, MIS Computer Corp.
James Wilson, corporate director of business intelligence and distribution at OUTRIGGER Resorts & Hotels, pointed to a deeper structural issue: organizational silos.“ There’ s a lot of siloed work occurring,” he said.“ Data sits in different buckets that don’ t correlate across departments. The challenge is taking that data, assimilating it and communicating it across the organization.”
CONNECTING THE DOTS Remington’ s Clark offered an example of how AI is already adding value— not by replacing human judgment, but by connecting information people rarely have time to analyze together.“ If we were to drop a CSV file of a thousand guest reviews into AI and then layer in service calls, out-oforder rooms, elevator issues and facilities data, it starts to tell us a story of why we might see a change,” he said.
Combining guest sentiment with maintenance records, staffing information and operational metrics is precisely the type of analysis that has historically fallen through the cracks because each department monitors its own data. AI, when properly connected, can bridge those gaps.
FRAGMENTED SYSTEMS Before that can happen at scale, however, the industry must contend with fragmented technology systems.
Many hotels, the participants posited, still operate on aging property management systems that were never designed to communicate with one another. Valuable data remains trapped in departmental databases, inaccessible to the people who need it.
“ Our approach is to be as scrappy as we can. We’ ll get it from a PDF, from a text document, from a system with an API. We’ ll get it,” said Russ Meek, senior director of product at Otelier.“ That’ s us living in the ecosystem that exists.”
The discussion also surfaced an uncomfortable question around accountability. Brands establish technology standards but don’ t pay for implementation.
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