Recently a World Panel of technology and marketing experts were asked to comment on the importance of hotel website analytics in this age of ill-conceived and overzealous government privacy and data regulations.
Here is my take:
Website analytics in isolation from the rest of the hotel tech stack has lost its importance. Combined with the property's CRM, RMS, a personalization engine and the rest of the tech stack, it is priceless and impacts many revenue-generation functions:
- Revenue Management: The website browsing behavior, booking engine denials, time spent on web pages of various packages, offers and hotel amenities are important data signals for the RMS and property pricing strategies.
- CRM: An AI-powered CRM tied to the website analytics can differentiate among different sets of preferences for the same guest, based on their different reason to travel: business, family vacation, attending a wedding, buddy or girls getaway, etc. All the data signals are there, all you need is the right technology to "read the tea leaves" in an automated fashion.
- Personalization: At NextGuest, now part of Cendyn, we implemented a Personalization Engine on our hotel clients' websites, which dynamically changes content and rate offers based on the visitors browsing behavior, CRM data, return/new customer, feeder market origination, and over 100 different demographic attributes.
- Generator of first-party data from website sign-ins, reward or loyalty program sign-ups, opt-in email sign-ups, etc. that can be used for similar audiences marketing.
Max Starkov
Hospitality & Online Travel Tech Consultant & Strategist
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