Knowing Your Customers

Single-screen inventory and rate management for hoteliers, and single-screen, graphic-laden booking engines for consumers are the latest innovations.

By Derek Gale, Associate Editor -- HOTELS Magazine, 10/1/2006

This diagram shows the IDT Group’s data consolidation process. From extracting and transforming to enriching and integrating data, the company aims to make it easier for hotels and resorts to use the information they have to get to know their guests.

We believe the better we know our guests, the better and more profitable [they] will be for us, and the better success we will have trying to find more,” says Lynn Burkholder, director of marketing for Hershey Resorts, Hershey, Pennsylvania. It’s a simple statement, but knowing your guests is a complex concept. It takes high-level planning, specific technology and perhaps most important, a clear idea of how to use the knowledge to benefit both the customer and the organization. The good news is that with determined people and knowledgeable technology partners, knowing your customers is an achievable goal.

Hershey Entertainment & Resorts is working toward that goal by looking at customer relationship management (CRM) as a company-wide initiative. For the past year, a committee has been identifying all sources of customer data within the organization. “We’ve been working to try to consolidate and get an understanding of what our guests do while here, experiencing the different venues that we own,” Burkholder says. “By doing that, we can understand who our guests are a little better, anticipate some of their needs and communicate with them in a more targeted way.” Hershey’s venues include the 232-guestroom Hotel Hershey, The Spa at The Hotel Hershey, the 665-guestroom Hershey Lodge, two 18-hole golf courses, Hershey Highmeadow Campground, Hersheypark, ZooAmerica and the GIANT Center arena. Needless to say, the company collects customer data at many different touch points. But whereas in the past that information has been siloed, now, with the help of the Philadelphia-based IDT Group, Hershey executives are creating a data warehouse through which they will have a unified view of the formerly fragmented guest information.

“They’re not unlike most resorts, hotels and theme parks—awash in data from different operating systems,” says IDT President Harry Rivkin about Hershey. “These data are generally inaccessible to the end users who require the data… [instead they are] locked into transaction-based systems. You seldom get a complete view of the guest from all sources.” Rivkin’s company specializes in harvesting data from these various systems and “performing the processes required to get a complete view of a guest.” The processes, which Rivkin says number in the hundreds, clean up the data by de-duping and consolidating records and putting the information into a database that is regularly updated, maintained, serviced and supported. The database is then able to drive a number of CRM activities, including direct mail and e-mail marketing initiatives, as well as enhanced guest service. “It’s all a matter of getting the right data to the right people at the right time in the right format,” Rivkin says. “That’s basically our job.”

The IDT Group specializes in helping hotels and resorts get a complete, single view of guests, using existing data from many different transaction based-systems.

Rivkin says all his clients are looking for the same thing: “They need to know in an accurate and comprehensive way what the guest is all about—preferences, stay frequency, how much they spend, who is a VIP, who qualifies for loyalty, et cetera.” That is certainly what Hershey is after. “We’ve looked at understanding our different kinds of guests—the most valued, versus those with potential that is untapped, versus guests that may have lapsed,” Burkholder says. This strategy will allow Hershey to differentiate and personalize marketing and guest services based on the type of customer.

Rivkin calls the work his company does with data an “esoteric kind of back-room activity” that is invisible to IDT customers. “In most hotels and resorts, they are less interested in how they got the solution than in simply getting the solution. We are supporting the doers with the information they need to make decisions and to do what they need to do strategically.” As for the technology, “It’s in the background where they are concerned,” he says. “It sits at our location—which serves as sort of a data center for them. Much of what we do in the delivery of the information is Web-based.”

Rivkin’s company does advise clients on ways to use the customer information and database, but he cautions against being overzealous. “You can do a lot of things with what we do for you, but you can’t implement them all effectively. You have to pick four to five action plans and implement them well.” That kind of guidance is key, Burkholder says. “We wouldn’t go forward on our own [after creating the data warehouse]. We’re looking for assistance [with] analytics. There’s so much we could do—where do you start, and then where do you go? That’s what we’re looking for now. We feel good about the data—now we’re trying to understand what it can do for us. It almost becomes unwieldy until you start to break it down.”

Another Unified Database
Another technology partner helping resorts consolidate guest information into a single, unified database is Toronto-based Enablez, provider of ResortSuite software. Rancho La Puerta, a fitness resort and spa in Tecate, California, this spring selected the ResortSuite software to manage its operations. “We need very reliable information in order to provide personal service for our many repeat customers,” says Peter Jensen, director of marketing. “We chose ResortSuite to provide us excellent property-wide communication.” Using the software allows guests to be recognized universally across the property, which is key at a resort where each guest may be immersed in variety of activities from spa treatments and fitness programs to classes and boutique shopping. ResortSuite’s ability to track each guest’s requests, expenditures and preferences at every stage of the process becomes critical to helping us maintain a personal touch,” Jensen says.

The Horseshoe Resort in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, also is benefiting from using the ResortSuite software. The resort offers skiing, golf, fine dining and retail outlets. “Because of the way the application works, you can easily go in and if you are trying to figure out if people are using the different facilities, you can bring up a person’s name, and see whether [he] went golfing or to the spa,” says Susan Fleet, project manager. From there, the resort can differentiate pre-stay or on-property marketing to returning guests. For example, “our reservations department doesn’t do spa reservations,” Fleet says, but thanks to the software, the agents would know if a guest previously had a spa treatment while on property, and then could offer to set up another treatment for the guest. “It’s a point of reference for the people at the other end of the phone,” Fleet says. “We couldn’t really do this before,” she adds. “It didn’t work well—none of the applications talked to each other, except to post charges to the property management system.”

With a commitment to customer relationship management and the help of technology partners that specialize in software and methods to organize, manage and analyze data, these resorts are getting to know their guests and their guests’ preferences, allowing them to personalize communication and service, which in turn drives loyalty and revenue. For hotels and resorts looking to keep guests satisfied, loyal and profitable, resorts like these make good role models.

Renaissance Schaumburg Wires for the Future

The newly opened Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center in Illinois was built with the future of technology in mind. “We’re prepared for things that are only dreams right now,” says Eric Ventura, multi-property systems manager for Renaissance Hotels and Resorts. “When voice over IP and video over IP technologies are made available to the consumer market, the infrastructure exists in our building to accommodate those technical needs.”

The entire hotel and convention center complex is wired with CAT-6 cable, which allows for faster and wider data transmission than CAT-5 or other, lower quality wiring. “CAT-6 is very forward-thinking,” Ventura says. “We have the ability to transfer mass amounts of data throughout the building.” In addition, the convention center operates on an OC-3 bandwidth, providing a potential Internet connection speed of 155.52 megabits per second. “It’s like the equivalent of an eight-lane highway versus a typical T-1 line that another hotel would have,” Ventura says. “We have capacity in excess of any client needs. We can support their needs for the next three to five years.

“The design of the project was committed to developing an infrastructure that could accommodate [everything] from simplistic networking to comprehensive live-broadcasting connectivity,” Ventura says. In the 100,000-sq. ft. (9,290-sq. m) convention center, utilities access panels are located every 30 ft. (9 m) throughout the entire space, providing access to the telecommunications network. And to top it all off, the complex has extra storage space for new technologies, ensuring that the facility can grow with new technological advances. “We’ve got more than we need,” Ventura says.