Using predictive analytics you can identify the elements of your service that drive guest value and track these over time. Spa promotions, golf offers, food and beverage specials or luxury elements in hotel rooms could all be drivers of guest value.

Once the drivers are identified, you can project how they will affect profitability. If responses to offers are not tracking as expected, you can send an additional offer. If luxury elements in the rooms cause additional housekeeping effort, you can invest in tools to reduce these expenses.

Right: Luxury elements in guest rooms could be one of the drivers of guest value.

In addition to looking historically at these drivers, you can forecast how the drivers will affect future revenues and profitability. Having forward looking insight into the business allows you to proactively monitor these impacts using powerful predictive analytics, and take corrective actions before your business is affected.

Once you identify your most valuable guests, understand their activities and behaviors and identify the drivers of value, marketing automation tools such as SAS® Marketing Automation can help you create targeted promotions designed with your guests in mind. Using analytics with marketing automation, you are now able to send the right offer to the right guest at the right time.

Automation reduces the labor involved with creating and executing a promotion, and personalization ensures that your guests receive the right offer for them. Marketing budgets are reduced at the same time that responses increase. Why send out an offer to your entire database when you only need a specific number of responses?

In addition, guest satisfaction increases because you are not blanketing your guests with junk mail, and the offers they do receive are still available when they call to redeem them.

The answers to what your guests want are sitting in your data, and predictive analytics is the key to finding these insights.

Natalie Osborn is the senior industry consultant for SAS Institute’s Hospitality and Travel practice, and an 18+ year veteran of hospitality and hospitality technology solutions development, specializing in revenue management. Prior to joining SAS, Natalie was the director, product marketing for Minneapolis-based IDeaS Revenue Solutions, where she worked from 2000 to 2011.

http://blogs.sas.com/content/hospitality/author/natalieosborn