Hotel business intelligence starts with data management

Most hotels collect more data than ever, yet few can say how long it takes them to answer a group request, or where a booking got stuck between two systems. Hotel business intelligence promises to fix that with dashboards and reports, but those dashboards are only as good as the data flowing into them. Before a hotel can act on insights, it needs to know which data it owns, where that data travels and what is worth measuring.

Felix Kraemer, co-founder of a consultancy for data management and revenue management in hospitality, has worked in the industry since the early 2000s. He moved from the front desk into revenue management and eventually worked on a large data orchestration platform for a hotel group. In his view, data management is the foundation for everything, and most hotels underestimate both the risk of neglecting it and the revenue that good data can reveal.

What hotel business intelligence really rests on

The first mistake, in Kraemer's experience, is a wrong idea of what data is. Many hotels treat it as an IT topic and hand it to whoever maintains the servers. He sees it as a discipline of its own that sits on top of IT infrastructure and asks for a different mindset: someone has to identify the data sources and make sure the right data flows, not all of it.

“Mindset of someone who's doing the infrastructure maintenance is complete different to someone who just identify data sources and make sure that data flows, that correct data flows, that not all data flows, only relevant data flows.”

Felix Kraemer, 12:46

He argues that data should be treated as an asset and as the base of the company, not as a side task. That matters even more now that everyone is talking about AI agents. Without a proper database underneath, he warns, the output of any new tool cannot be trusted. For hotel business intelligence the lesson is simple: the reports you build later depend on the structure you build first.

Own your data flows instead of waiting on vendors

A common setup in hotels: two external systems need to exchange data, and the hotel asks vendor A to talk to vendor B. Kraemer calls that the easiest way, but also a long one, because the hotel gives up ownership of the data moving between the systems. When something breaks, it has no way to see where. A related article looks at getting more from a hotel channel manager.

“You cannot monitor your data flow and you cannot act on issues in the data flow because if something is not working, you need to call vendor a and vendor b and both will say it's not my fault and you're losing time.”

Felix Kraemer, 9:16

In what he calls a good data management world, the hotel reviews its own orchestration platform, sees at which stage the data is stuck and which part of the workflow fails, and fixes it. A few practical points follow from his experience:

• Treat data management as a discipline with its own owner, not as a request to the IT department.
• Map your data sources and decide which data should flow, instead of sending everything everywhere.
• Monitor the flows between systems yourself, so you can find and fix the stage where data gets stuck.
• Build on a robust, clean infrastructure; after a cyber incident, his team rebuilt its data orchestration on Linux because it is fast and robust.

The cost of not owning the infrastructure became very concrete for him. After a cyber attack on the hotel group where he worked, it took more than six months to bring the last of around 60 properties back into the network, with new devices and newly configured servers. The opportunities missed in that time cannot be measured, he says, but they were massive. A related article covers AI security risks for hotels.

The KPI most hotels ignore: time to offer

Asked which KPI hotels should track but often ignore, Kraemer points to the time between a request arriving at the hotel and the offer going out. Almost no one can measure it, he says, because the process often lives inside an Outlook inbox. Yet in group and MICE business, where a client sends the same request to 10 or 20 properties, speed decides who wins. He cites recent studies on this:

• Hotels that answer first convert around 55% of those leads on average.
• Hotels that answer all leads within five hours on average convert about 50%.
• Hotels that need more than eighteen hours drop to an average of around 10%.

“He will do five times more revenue than you with the same amount of incoming bookings.”

Felix Kraemer, 18:46

His example: one hotel sends out 100 offers and gets 10 bookings, while a competitor that manages the process better converts 50 of the same 100 requests, only because of speed. This is exactly the kind of number a good reporting setup should surface. A related article looks at hotel KPIs and team targets.

Where the group business funnel leaks revenue

According to the figures Kraemer quotes, only 45% of incoming requests in chain hospitality get answered at all, and about 25% of that is converted. A large part of what marketing and sales bring in is therefore never processed.

The bottleneck often sits inside the hotel. A reservations agent waits for revenue management to provide a rate before building the block and the offer. His calculation: if a hotel saves ten minutes per request on internal quotation, and agents process around 25 requests a day, it could save up to 50% of its human resource in reservations, handle the full funnel with existing staff, or use the budget for open positions differently. Clients, he adds, would ideally like to receive an offer within one hour.

Cloud, open APIs and knowing when to ask for help

Kraemer expects the majority of hotel companies, including smaller and mid-scale chains, to move to cloud infrastructure within one to three years. Without open API infrastructure, he says, hotels cannot make use of smart new technology at all. Legacy systems that require manual processes lead to bad work conditions and the loss of talent, so the move to the cloud helps staff as much as performance.

His final advice is about attitude. Saying you need more revenue or fewer manual hours is easy; accepting that data is not your profession and asking for help is harder. If a hotel tries to build everything alone, the time to market is so long that the result is outdated when it is ready. For any hotel serious about hotel business intelligence, the order is clear: get the basics of data management right, then build reports and AI on top. You can watch the full conversation for the complete story.

Frequently asked questions

What is hotel business intelligence built on?

In Felix Kraemer's view, it rests on data management: knowing your data sources, deciding which data should flow and owning the flows between systems. He sees data management as a discipline of its own that sits on IT infrastructure, not as an IT task. Without a proper database underneath, dashboards and AI tools produce results that cannot be trusted.

Which KPI do hotels often ignore?

The time from an incoming request to the offer that goes out. Kraemer says almost no hotel measures it, because requests are handled in an email inbox. For group business it decides conversion: studies he cites show around 55% for the first hotel to respond and about 10% for hotels that need more than eighteen hours.

Why should hotels own their data flows?

When two external systems exchange data and something breaks, both vendors may say it is not their fault while the hotel loses time. If the hotel runs its own orchestration platform, it can see at which stage data is stuck, fix the failing part of the workflow and get everything running again much faster.

Should hotels build data management in-house or get help?

Kraemer advises hotels to be open to asking for help, using internal or external resources. In his experience, doing it all alone means a learning curve so long that the solution is outdated when it is ready. Reviewing the basics first and then getting expert support gives a faster time to market and a solid base for years.