I should have expected it! The end of January/beginning of February always seems to bring some kind of major snow event in the East. Here in Cary, NC we experienced only a couple of inches of snow, but that snow covered a solid inch of ice underneath. Several hundred miles
2015 was a busy year for the hotel industry. ADR, Occupancy and RevPAR achieved record highs. We saw extensive merger and acquisition activity, culminating at the end of the year with the acquisition of Starwood by Marriot and Fairmont by Accor (and don’t forget Expedia’s Orbitz acquisition, of course). Favorable
As consumers have moved to digital channels and digital interactions, competition for the hotel consumer has increased dramatically. Now, hotels not only compete with each other, but also with third-party online distributors, and even new disruptors from the sharing economy like AirBnB. However, hotels have one advantage that these other
Revenue management is a relatively young discipline in the hotel industry. Hotels only started to broadly adopt revenue management processes and systems in the late 90s and early 2000s. While the discipline has achieved success and gained visibility over the last decade and a half, it is still relatively new
with Natalie Osborn, Senior Industry Consultant, Hospitality and Gaming Practice, SAS We’ve taught analytics 101 through the last couple of blog posts, and now that you have passed that course, you are ready to take an advanced course in analytics. Ok, not really, we won’t subject you to that, but
with Natalie Osborn, Senior Industry Consultant, Hospitality and Gaming Practice, SAS. It’s back to school time, and back to school reminds me of getting back to the basics. So, we thought we’d start the fall with a “back to the basics” refresher series on analytics. To accomplish this, Natalie and
We’ve been talking about data recently at the Analytic Hospitality Executive. I’ve advocated to use whatever data you have, big or small, to get started today on analytic initiatives that will help you avoid big data paralysis. In this blog, I’m going to get a bit more technical than usual
With all of the discussion about big data these days, it is easy to think that every problem is a big data problem. Yes, there is a lot of data out there these days, and of course we all love a nice big data set, but you don’t always need
We have spent a good deal of time at the Analytic Hospitality Executive advocating for the value of big data for hospitality. Just a few months ago, for example, I wrote a two part series on how Big Data was a “big opportunity” for hotels and casinos. Our goal at
Innovation within hospitality drives awareness, service delivery, guest engagement, and brand differentiation. SAS asked a panel of experts to comment on how innovation is shaping the hospitality industry. According to many of our experts, analytics is at the heart of innovation. Learn more in this white paper on building
From the pressures of a highly competitive marketplace to changing economic conditions, to the evolution of the distribution network - the challenges facing the hospitality are many and varied. In this video, SAS asked a panel of experts to share their views on the issues that will challenge the hospitality
For hotel companies, it is challenging to find new ways to differentiate in an ever evolving marketplace. There is a lot of talk in our industry about the increasing numbers of third party channels and distributors to have entered the marketplace, and how that impacts the hotel company’s core business.
We asked our partners at the Cornell Center for Hospitality Research to comment on what they are seeing in terms of trends that will impact the hospitality industry in 2015. Cathy Enz, full professor in strategy and The Lewis G. Schaeneman Jr. Professor of Innovation and Dynamic Management at the
By now you have seen dozens of articles with trends and predictions for what the hospitality industry should expect in 2015. I’m not going to add to those, or rehash them exhaustively here. You’ve all probably read them yourself and gathered the highlights: optimism, more acquisitions, transaction volumes will stay
Well, Analytic Hospitality Executives, the year has once again flown by, and here we sit just before the holidays looking back on 2014, and figuring out what it all means for 2015. I traveled even more than usual this year (if that’s even possible), spending a significant amount of time
Last week, I spoke to Suneel Grover, senior solutions architect for digital intelligence at SAS, about how better data and integration can drive improvements in web analytics. This week I wanted to see how this could be applied for a hospitality company. We decided to tackle a frequently debated topic in
There’s a lot of talk about modernizing hospitality marketing – and most of it is dependent on finally cracking the nut between online and offline guest data and bringing predictive analytics to play. But there is a fundamental problem hampering our ability to do this and it starts with how hospitality
I generally don’t use this blog to air my personal experiences, but recent events have reminded me of a few things that I think would benefit our Analytic Hospitality Executives and their organizations to also be reminded of. This past week, I took my fifth trip to Asia this year.
Big data is of no use unless you can turn it into information and insight. For that you need big analytics. Every piece of the analytics cycle has been impacted by big data, from reporting, with the need to quickly render reports from billions of rows of data, through advanced
Next week I will be presenting at the Cornell Hospitality Research Summit on big data and revenue management. In preparation for the Summit, I have recorded a short presentation that outlines how big data can help augment revenue management. Alex Dietz talks about how big data can help revenue management.
If you haven’t heard of an APCD, it’s one of those acronyms you need to know. All-Payer Claims Databases are simply databases that consist of claims data from all health care payers in a given state. This includes private payers such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, and public payers such
