In a matter of weeks, this free resource has garnered the attention of nearly 200 groups, representing over 15,000 hotels worldwide.

”The speed at which our industry is adopting this tool has far exceeded our expectations,” said Ali Moloo, founder and CEO of myDigitalOffice. “It validates our own, and our customers’ beliefs in the value and mission of the MAPP report.”

Since the fallout from COVID-19 began to unfold in North America, myDigitalOffice’s globally dispersed team collaborated to develop and deliver these reporting capabilities to help accelerate market recovery and support the continuity of the hospitality industry.

Leveraging data from the MAPP report, in the following charts, myDigitalOffice reported occupancy and ADR for the July 4th holiday weekend, as of each week dating back to 5/21. Then, as of Monday July 6, the report shows what actually happened.

This data further illustrates the recent phenomenon in our industry of shorter-than-normal booking windows. The data below shows that in the final few days leading up to the weekend, hotel occupancy in the state of Florida jumped by nearly 10%. Additionally, while occupancy steadily climbed each week, rates slowly decreased.

The MAPP report provides a guide to help hoteliers navigate today’s uncharted landscape. By leveraging forward-looking, aggregated, and anonymized hotel and market-level bookings pace and performance metrics, hoteliers are enabled to make more strategic, future data-driven business decisions much sooner.

Powerful integrations also allow users to access their own portfolio data instantly, eliminating hours of manual data manipulation and analysis. With the combination of hoteliers’ own portfolio data and broader market business on the books, the MAPP report provides critical information for benchmarking and identifying future demand trends to visualize market recovery in real-time.

The more hotels that participate in this report, the richer and more valuable the data set becomes to hoteliers and to the broader industry, especially in times of recovery. Hoteliers can help the industry during these challenging times while setting themselves up for success with future business on the books data by opting into the MAPP report. To get started, please click here.

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Most hoteliers know how to adjust their strategies in anticipation of upcoming trends, but guest data provides the key that will unlock profitable opportunities during traditionally low periods of the year.

The problem is that hoteliers struggle with their guest data. According to hotel data company Revinate, many admit that it’s difficult to make data meaningful and find the information unstructured. While this may be true in many cases there are great CRM tools available such as Batchbook that allow you to learn more about your clients in one place and build a relationship with them – and that leads on to the all-important client engagement.

Data collection is a powerful tool for hoteliers, and many are properly managing personal data for its long-term value. An email address helps connect guest data across multiple platforms.  It’s an important factor for noticing patterns and touch points related to pre-trip, in-stay and post-trip data. Personalized email campaigns that can drive bookings and repeat stays, enabling hotels to have better occupancy rates hand-in-hand with brand loyalty.

While peak season keeps the website and location buzzing, low season is the best time to keep in touch and a dialogue going with your guests.   Stay in touch with your clients through text messages and social platforms as well as emails, to maintain brand awareness and generate booking and location excitement throughout the year. Social media enables you to share content that inspires your followers during the low season. It’s also a great way to gather testimonials and customer reviews.

With personalization becoming a priority for many hoteliers, so is the founding need for analytical insights. Hotels can learn to collate across multiple touch points and data profiling to deliver a better customer experience.

This applies all year round but by structuring your data queries to focus on key periods that need a boost and using the best revenue management tools you can act with confidence.

Get Personal

According to MarketingProfs, email marketing is one of the most effective channels for over 5o% of marketers, coming second only to a hotel’s direct website.  An email address helps connect guest data across multiple platforms. It becomes an important factor for noticing patterns and touch points related to pre-trip, in-stay and post-trip data.

A report from SiteMinder shows that almost 80% of hoteliers believe that prioritizing guest personalization and experience would bring the most success to them, followed by branding at 67%.

Keep your guests informed. Let them know about your latest deals and offerings. You’ll gain deeper insights into the behaviour of your clients and better understand what motivates them.  You can use this data to send targeted off-season deals.

Ask customers to share their suggestions, stories and experiences and what they want next from their visit. The key here is to keep a dialogue going with your guests and tap into what inspires them to book.

Targeted Off-Season Promotions

This is crucial. Use knowledge about your customers—likes and dislikes—to promote specific destinations, hotels and experiences during low seasons, particularly when it comes to special discounts.  This is your area and you know it better than anyone, which is a major advantage when selecting and recommending local activities, restaurants and experiences.

If your hotel proposes a plan that includes accommodation, a tour, and some places in the city where you can beat the crowds and take the best pics, it will make a difference. Destination content technology companies such as Smartvel provide local information in real time. The information they provide enables hotels to enhance the customer experience, allowing customised plans for travellers but also opportunities and scope to negotiate a fair kick back from subsequent bookings and reservations.

Offering special deals to loyal customers—additional room nights, discounts on transfers, tickets and experiences is a great way to offset seasonal lows. Use festivals, sporting events, concerts and movie promotion shows and pop culture tie-ins to fill the sales gap.

The tours and events market is huge and has become a multi- billion dollar global industry. By positioning the hotel as the focal point of the destination and offering this as part of your product, you will increase revenue and room occupancy.

The prices of ancillaries can be used to recoup the difference in hotel room rates. Creating exciting content on social media such as early bird offers, and cleverly planned hashtag campaigns can help turn an audience into paying customers.

Smart Advertising and MICE

Show your property in different ways. The hospitality industry in particular thrives on this. Suite-level rooms for business travellers for an off-season low budget trip can be an effective marketing tactic.  

Business travellers are not influenced by seasonal trends and this helps the tourism sector continue to thrive all year around.

The MICE sector is extremely profitable. The combination of meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions, is now an integral part of the global hospitality industry. It stood at $752 billion in 2016 and is projected to grow at 7.5 per cent in the next five years.

Targeting delegations can help even smaller operators earn a healthy profit, as these groups, particularly the smaller ones, often tend to look for unique and tailor-made services in terms of accommodation and tours. More travellers are combining work with leisure activities in their business destination, which again presents a great opportunity for travel agents and tour operators to keep sales going during off-seasons.

Innovative strategies to maximize revenue is key for hoteliers, destination management companies and travel agencies. A marketing framework is necessary in order to maximize the scale of profitability during low season. These are sales gaps which with clever marketing strategies can actually turn seasonal lows into highs.

Phan Le, CEO and Founder VLeisure, a Vietnam-based B2B global travel network platform that empowers agencies to manage and distribute travel products and services to their online partners. We have access to over 50,000 hotels across the globe and are big advocates of maintaining profit throughout the year. With our global network of travel suppliers, you can now access a rich product database.

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Hapi is designed to solve the hotel industry’s rapidly expanding data management challenges while also addressing the traditionally high integration costs and lack of vendor alignment that inhibits innovation and efficiency. The cloud-based platform is an open-source model based on the same proven technology that runs some of the world’s largest social media and business services, to which multiple layers of encryption, authentication, and governance are added.

Intelligent Hospitality joins a community of innovative hospitality technology providers that believe that open and secure exchange of data is critical to a hotel’s success. Hapi enables a cost-effective, easy and quick way to connect to property management systems (PMS) such as Oracle’s Opera.

HotelIQ, the world’s leading business intelligence platform in the hospitality industry, provides hoteliers with data-driven tools to optimize revenue and profitability such as dashboards, analytics, reports, and insights. HotelIQ has won the Top Hotel BI Software award years in a row and is acknowledged as a standout software partner in JP Morgan 2018 CIO Survey.

“Our goal at Intelligent Hospitality is to arm our hotel partners with timely and actionable insights and give them the ability to easily leverage data for tactical and strategic planning and decision support,” said Apo Demirtas, Founder and CEO of Intelligent Hospitality. “By combining HotelIQ with Hapi, hotels will be able to open up the flow of data from siloed operational systems into HotelIQ’s analytics platform that will not only eliminate the need for static manual reports but also empower decision-makers with holistic analytical views of their business that weren’t possible before.”

The Hapi data streaming platform is based on the most advanced and scalable technologies found in the Apache Kafka solution. Through this proven backbone, multiple layers of encryption, authentication, and governance are added to ensure maximum data security and efficiency for all connections and data flows. To aid hotel companies with PCI compliance, Hapi recently received PCI-DSS Level 2 certification. By providing data enrichment, connection options, scalability, and security, Hapi unleashes the potential for innovation at a low cost.

Luis Segredo, CEO of Data Travel, LLC., providers of Hapi, commented: “We are delighted to welcome Intelligent Hospitality to our fast-growing community of hospitality technology partners who believe that, together, we can help the industry move forward through innovation. Through this partnership, Intelligent Hospitality will be able to provide easy and cost-effective access to HotelIQ for hotels around the world at the click of a button.”

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Measuring the impact of each touchpoint of a conversion can be tricky – the disjoined data from hotel systems and channels makes it hard to know where exactly to allocate your marketing budget. As a result, the last click in the customer journey is often given all of the credit for the conversion, as well as a larger share of the budget than any other stage of the purchase funnel. But can that assumption result in a missed opportunity to invest in a potentially more impactful channel?

We spoke to Hotel Heroes Blessy Townes, Vice President & Head of Digital at Discovery Hospitality, and Pelayo Pando, eCommerce Business Development & Market Strategy Director at NH Hotel Group about the most common budgeting mistakes they’ve encountered, and what best practices your hotel can implement when building an effective attribution model.

What are hoteliers getting wrong with conversion attribution?

Pelayo: The key is to define a correct attribution model that rewards the most impactful touchpoints of the customer journey. Hotels tend to allocate all credit to the last touchpoint. Think of it as a soccer game, where all the praise goes to strikers. But without the goalkeepers, defenders and midfielders you cannot win the match! In the hotel industry, the game is even trickier because we have to play in two very different fields at the same time: desktop and mobile. Understanding the connection between the two is key for building an efficient marketing budget investment strategy.

Blessy: One of the most common mistakes around conversion attribution is the outdated belief that the customer journey ends at the booking. In reality, a user goes through several stages in their journey to purchase, including inspiration, research, planning, booking, traveling and post-traveling. Hoteliers need to remember that conversion is not always the main goal of this journey. Instead, they need to focus on creating a meaningful relationship with a customer on every stage of their stay.

There is also a popular myth that a typical conversion window is around ninety days. However, the rewards of a pay-per-click model can be instantaneous, while SEO takes longer time to show results. Different models and channels must all be carefully considered – while one may be performing extremely well (especially if it’s based on first- or last-click attribution), it doesn’t mean you can remove other channels from your marketing mix.

There are many touchpoints in a traveller’s booking journey – how do you know that you’re investing your marketing budget into the right one?

Blessy: While search engines are a crucial touchpoint and SEO can drive free traffic, it can take time to rank high on the likes of Google. At Discovery, we first focused our advertising budget on the lower parts of the sales funnel – in this case, the planning and booking stages. Achieving excellent ROI (not ROAS) then enabled us to scale up and increase our presence in the earlier stages of the customer journey.

We also tried retargeting and immediately saw our conversions skyrocketing; artificial intelligence and machine learning then helped us sharpen our targeting capabilities even further.
With our market being 80% local and 20% foreign, we decided to concentrate our limited budget on the latter. With the help of a partner who can help us reach overseas markets, our year-to-date direct booking has grown by 50%, compared to a growth of 20% on third-party channels.

Pelayo: At NH, we use a tailor-made attribution model based on data-driven statistical models. Based on our algorithms, we are able to determine the importance of different touchpoints and invest more in those that are having the most influence on the decision of the customer. We’ve invested a lot of time into creating these models as the impact of each touchpoint can vary over time. Hotels should be continuously assessing their guests’ booking journeys, and adjusting their budget accordingly.

How do you build an ideal attribution strategy?

Blessy: There’s no single perfect attribution strategy for hotels. To drive sustainable long-term growth, marketers have to marry science and creativity to create a model that’s relevant to their business in terms of a number of factors, such as: market sources, geolocation, customer journey, media consumption, distribution channels, booking channels, booking lead time and conversion windows. Most importantly, it has to be tied to their business objectives. Remember that the ultimate goal of having an attribution strategy is to generate meaningful insights and make actionable decisions.

Pelayo: I agree – there is no ideal model! If we were to apply NH’s attribution strategy to a different hotel chain, the results wouldn’t be the same. To create the right strategy for your hotel, you have to define clear business objectives. For example, do you want to maximize revenues, margin, ADR or occupancy? Your chosen objectives will affect your attribution strategy. Last but not least, it is important to keep in mind that building a plan for an independent hotel or a small hotel chain is not the same as for large hotel groups. Before anything else, make sure that this model works for you.

How can hotels create a holistic view of all factors affecting conversion on a customer’s path to purchase?

Blessy: Having an omnichannel view of your customer is ideal. Create customer personas based on your target markets and relevant segments, evaluate an entire consumer journey and identify all touchpoints needed to make a meaningful connection with each persona to assist conversion.

Pelayo: I’d like to add that there is no magical solution that will work for everybody. To build a data-driven model that works for your hotel, you need to have in-depth knowledge of your product, targeted customer groups and the performance of your partners.

What are the dangers of having siloed acquisition and conversion tools when working with tech partners?

Blessy: All channels should work together on the path to purchase. There is a danger of concentrating too much of your marketing budget only on the top-performing channels. The danger is to drop some channels only because they are not scoring high in our attribution model. As Karen Sauder, Vice President of Google, mentioned in a recent blog post, “marketers need to look at insights across the entire consumer journey to get a picture of what’s working — and what’s not”

Pelayo: The main risk is definitely investing the money in the wrong channel. There are channels with very good efficiency but are hardly scalable, so the incremental investment is done at a very high incremental cost. You can also miss out on understanding how investing in one channel impacts the others, and risk duplicating efforts and investing more than is needed.

Another big danger is to overlook the relationship between different devices. You might get an idea that investing in desktop is much more efficient, but neglecting mobile these days means you are potentially harming your customer acquisition capabilities and your mid-term profitability.

Can A/B testing be used to test the impact of various touchpoints on website conversions?

Pelayo: A classic A/B test with random audiences is a technological challenge. In order to do it properly the level of integration in the tools, data processing capabilities and knowledge has to be superb to be able to take the right conclusions. Rather than this, we rely more on testing based on segmented audiences and machine learning algorithms that keep your attribution updated with the continuous changes of the market dynamics and customer needs.

Can you outline the conversion attribution strategy at your organization?

Blessy: At Discovery Hospitality, we believe that convenience drives loyalty. Guests choose us because of the seamless website experience and the availability of direct channels to process their booking. While our year-to-date revenue has grown 73% compared to last year, over 65% of our direct bookings are completed outside of our booking engine. As a workaround, booking engine conversions are monitored and analyzed, including proxy metrics such as Click to Call, inquiries, etc., and overall ad spend is reported and justified with ROI.

While our channels are viewed and optimized individually, we think it’s crucial to see them working together on the path to purchase.

Pelayo: At NH Hotels, we are in the process of solving this conversion attribution puzzle with cutting-edge technology and a team of experts. We are trying to connect all these pieces to determine where the key touchpoints are. That’s how we find out where to invest our marketing dollars to generate the highest value in the short and the mid/long term. We’re also trying to sort the cross-device attribution issues. This is a big challenge, but we are certain that our efforts will pay off!

The current and future growth of our direct channel is driven by correct marketing investments and attribution based on data-driven decisions.

Want to learn more from Blessy and Pelayo? Submit your question for the Hotel Heroes panel and see it featured in this month’s edition of Ask the Hotel Heroes article.

Alisa Voitika is Brand and Content Manager at Triptease.

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The end result can be inefficiencies, frustration, impaired customer experiences and lost revenue.

In a competitive, data-heavy industry, hotels must prioritize IT performance.

With the wealth of data available from property management systems, CRM systems, call centers, mobile apps and more, hotels have access to business intelligence like never before. While this is a great advantage, it also can cause problems for hotels that aren’t investing in IT system performance.

It’s important to understand how the architecture and interoperability of IT systems are impacting the value and usability of that business intelligence. IT systems must be able to collect data from multiple, wide-ranging sources; process, store and manage that data, and; share the data and its insights within the organization.

Given the cost and vulnerability of on-premise IT systems, the hotel industry is increasingly moving to cloud-based accounting and guest record systems from third-party providers. Each hotel’s system must work well with this dispersed network of servers and applications.

This decentralization can cause inefficiencies and frustration — to both customers and hotel employees — if the IT system is suffering from performance degradation.

Like healthcare, finance and other complex modern fields, hotels are dependent on a network of databases. They must be able to store and process a significant and growing amount of data effectively and securely — the success of which relies on a high-performing IT system.

The Root Cause of Data Performance Issues

Input/output (I/O) refers to the amount of data that must be read from storage, computed, presented and then written back to storage, with each action being the input/output.

Three main issues cause I/O bottlenecks:

• Data pipelines
• Non-application I/O overhead
• File system overhead

Each of these issues alone can result in data performance degradations of 30 to 50 percent. Together, these issues will cause major problems for any hardware setup.

In any enterprise, about 30 to 40 percent of application performance is being robbed by small, fractured, random I/O generated from the Windows operating system (this includes any Windows operating system, including Windows 10 or Windows Server 2019). While Windows is a valuable solution used by an estimated 80 percent of all systems in the world, there are issues with how it handles I/O:

• Windows handles I/O logically rather than physically, meaning it breaks down reads and writes to their lowest common denominator;
• This results in fractured, random I/O that creates a “noisy” environment;
• Adding a growing number of virtualized systems into the mix results in something known as the I/O blender effect.

Let’s look at one example:

• Performing a database function, such as adding a traveler’s name to the reservation list for a certain night at a certain hotel — requires the system to identify and access that particular list (read) and then alter it (write).
• The speed at which the system can do this is dependent on its I/O capacity — how much data it can access and alter in a single operation.
• Over time, these reads and writes tend to become smaller, increasingly fractured and more random, requiring the computer to perform more operations (and thus take more time) to process a given amount of data.

Fortunately, there are cost-effective solutions — and they don’t involve buying expensive hardware.

Software vs. Hardware

As the volume of data increases, hotel IT professionals may mistakenly think that IT infrastructure upgrades are necessary.

New hardware can buy improved performance for a time, but network pipeline challenges will remain because of the sheer amount of data. Think of it as being stuck in traffic on a road that wasn’t built to handle the volume.

Even IT experts are often surprised to learn that software can solve the problem — at a fraction of the cost of hardware and with much less, if any, downtime. Applying a software solution also helps IT managers avoid the disruption of migrating to new systems, rip and replacement of hardware and end-user training.

Software solutions exist that can address storage performance at the operating system, file system and application levels, boosting performance 30 to 50 percent or more without a hardware or network upgrade.

James D’Arezzo is CEO of Condusiv Technologies, a global provider of software-only storage performance solutions for virtual and physical server environments.

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While the United States and other countries have imposed certain restrictions that may delay 5G adoption, other countries, including China, aren’t wasting any time in embracing the 5G network. The InterContinental Shenzhen, which also has the distinction of being the first 5-star Spanish themed hotel in China, is the first hotel property to deploy 5G.

The hotel announced this week that it has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Shenzhen Telecom and Huawei to create what is being aptly called “the world’s first 5G smart hotel.”

5G enables data transfer and download speeds that are multitudes faster than current connections. Average speeds of around 1GBps are expected to be the norm. Providing the infrastructure needed to carry enormous amounts of data, 5G networks will help power the proliferation of Internet of Things technology, allowing for the rise of vastly smarter and more connected devices.

This obviously holds a lot of promise for hotels that rely heavily on data-driven technology capabilities to optimize operations and guest services. The 5G network also makes cloud services more stable, reliable and powerful.

By introducing an end-to-end 5G network with integrated terminals and cloud applications, the project is expected to open the door to digital transformation of the hotel experience. The hotel expects to be able deliver guest services that are far more innovative and customized,  improving the overall guest experience.

Shenzhen Telecom’s deployment of Huawei’s 5G network equipment will allow the property to achieve continuous indoor and outdoor 5G coverage. Guests will be able to experience 5G hotel applications through 5G smartphones and customer-premises equipment (CPE) terminals, including 5G welcome robots, 5G cloud computing terminals, 5G cloud games and 5G cloud virtual reality (VR) rowing machines.

In the hotel lobby, guests will be able to access the 5G network through CPEs or their smartphones to experience high speed 5G downloads and uploads. Meanwhile, 5G robots will provide services that include guest information, destination guidance, and goods delivery. The presidential suite will provide guests with 5G hotel services such as cloud VR rowing machines, cloud games and 4K movies.

The download speed on the indoor 5G network can reach 500 megabits per second (Mbps). This offers a far superior user experience for VR gamers, in particular.

Over time, Huawei and Chinese carriers expect to go beyond 5G welcome robots, cloud computing terminals, cloud games and VR rowing machines to make the hotel even smarter and expand the experience into other areas. Future services might include integrating a hotel loyalty program to identify a guest upon arrival. Other features might include issuing electronic room keys to a smart phone and self wayfinding and proximity messaging with rich video content to promote hotel amenities and facilities.

Being “the world’s first 5G smart hotel” is a nice feather in the cap for The InterContinental Shenzhen. It may be an even more notable achievement than being the first 5-star Spanish themed hotel in China.

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Not surprisingly, the new breed of hotel business intelligence tools are cloud-based, mobile-enabled and specifically designed to meet the needs of on-the-go hotel operators. The tools deliver deep insights, faster and in far more accessible ways than most people only a few years ago could have even imagined possible.

The tools can pull data from the property management system, central reservation system, point of sale system, CRM system, channel management system, and any other existing system. The tools can also extract data on-the-fly from spreadsheets and any number of other sources, including guest satisfaction survey repositories, call centers, social networking apps, and website, mobile and in-room chatbox and text-based device logs.

BI means using interactive visualization tools to bring data to life in a dazzling array of color-coded charts, funnels, pies, spider webs and various other configurations as well as drill-down and data filtering features to navigate, manipulate and analyze the data.

Still, it is important to remember that, initially and also on an ongoing basis, BI also means leveraging the right data. The value of the interactive visualizations, dashboards and reports is entirely contingent on the quality of the data from which they are generated.

The diversity, velocity and sheer volume of data in the hotel industry has increased by orders of magnitude in recent years. Hotel operators today have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to data. There is practically no end to the number of internal and external data sources at their disposal.

Meeting their business intelligence needs means, as a first step, connecting to data, whatever its source and wherever it may reside. But the key is to do so selectively, based on business objectives, whether those objectives relate to streamlining hotel operations, improving revenue management or identifying emerging trends in guest behaviors or market activity.

The question is: What data is relevant what data is not relevant and should not be included? This ranks as one of the top challenges with business intelligence, according to hotel operators, as indicated in the chart below.

In terms of data requirements for revenue management, most people would agree that the volume and depth of clean historical data related to occupancy, rate and revenue figures, including booking dates, rate codes, arrival dates, departure dates and revenue by day, provides the strongest basis for predictive modeling and forecasting accuracy.

For a large property, the totality of the data set may include dozens of guest segments, a dozen or more room types, several years of historical booking and reservations data, and upwards of a dozen length-of-stay buckets.

Multiple other data sources may also provide significant value. For example, web shopping data (the number of travelers looking at and booking rooms and at what price, as well as the percentage of visitors abandoning the hotel website) can provide insights into current and future room demand as well as price sensitivity.

Because travelers shop beyond hotel websites, there are insights to be gleaned from the travel distribution network, as well — although, according to research conducted for a recent Starfleet Research study in partnership with The Rainmaker Group, less than one-third (29 percent) of hotel operators are capturing and integrating data related to guest website search and shopping behavior.

While more hotel operators are integrating customer lifetime value data into pricing and availability, modeling consumer behavior from click-stream data, and integrating loyalty and total property spend data, only 62 percent of hotel operators indicate that they are currently using spend data to determine the value of guests by segment. That percentage is bound to increase over time.

Market-level data, including publicly available competitor rate information gleaned from multiple channels, may also rank as a must-have data source. Most hotel operators agree it is necessary to closely monitor competitive activity in order to avoid significantly underselling or overpricing guest room inventory.

For sales and marketing data requirements, length and purpose of stay data as well as the history of individual guests’ on-property behavior, such as their food, drink or spa treatment preferences, may be valuable in determining what offers should be sent to them and the messaging around those offers. How the recipient responded to previous marketing campaigns and discounts can also help determine what, if any, future messages they should receive, through what channel(s), and whether the messages are likely to elicit a favorable response.

Hotel operators get excited about the ever-growing number of data sources, but, in the end, it is better to think of data in terms of “quality over quantity” rather than “the more the merrier.” Capturing and analyzing every last bit of data can be a recipe for disaster. At a certain point, more data can simply mean more noise and the exercise becomes one of diminishing returns. It is imperative hotel operators select data sources that will help with fast, accurate decision-making and avoid the temptation to capture and integrate every last piece of data available to them from every possible data source.

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Insight rolls up data from some of the industry’s most recognized data providers, along with operating statistics, brand data and proprietary M3 financial and labor data into a single, actionable and visual dashboard allowing hoteliers to make real decisions in real time.

In addition to providing at-a-glance centralized data through dashboards, Insight allows hoteliers to automate, schedule and share customized reports to improve operational efficiencies. The product also includes a pulse alert feature that enables users to set thresholds for specific key performance indicators, alerting the user if a threshold is crossed.

The M3 platform works seamlessly with other key systems and tools in the hospitality industry and offers robust accounting and financial analysis across entire portfolios with optional operations and time management features. M3’s professional services team provides on-demand support for hotels of any size by offering a full range of customized accounting solutions to scale with a hotel’s needs. M3 also includes a proprietary hotel benchmarking index that combines data from thousands of properties into a single accessible data set to compare hotel financial performance.

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Such is the tagline for Equinox Hotels, which last week announced the grand opening, in June, of its first hotel property with the launch of its online booking platform for room reservations. More than five years in the making, the five-star luxury hotel will occupy fourteen floors of a magnificent 1,000-foot-tall tower in the new $25 billion Hudson Yards residential, retail, and commercial development in New York City.

The hotel’s 212 guest rooms, which come with soundproofed walls and blackout shades, are designed to meet the highest guest expectations, including undisturbed REM (“a quiet, calming chamber for truly restorative rest,” reads the new website). A good night’s sleep doesn’t come cheap; room rates start at more than $700 per night.

Of course, the five-star hotel also comes with a host of attractions and amenities, not the least of which is the the largest-ever-built 60,000-square foot Equinox Fitness Club and Spa. A Los Angeles location, announced in 2017 and scheduled to open sometime next year, will consist of a 20-story hotel tower with 305 guest rooms.

According Equinox, the guest rooms will also tout “integrated technology for effortless personalization.” This includes an in-room digital guide “supported by yoga accessories and massage essentials.”

As the exercise and fitness chain giant makes its foray into the luxury hotel business, it only stands to reason that next-generation technology will play a big role in enhancing the quality of the guest experience. Given the upscale, technology-savvy and health-driven demographic to which the brand is catering, technology-enabled features and capabilities that streamline operations and drive personalization are bound to be ubiquitous throughout the property.

Founded in 1991, Equinox as a modern lifestyle brand has a long history of utilizing the latest in guest-facing technologies. In embracing the virtues of fitness and high performance, the company has often integrated technology in the service of improving guest health and the overall guest experience.

Innovations at its fitness clubs have ranged from technology-enabled spin classes and other data-rich devices to in-locker USB chargers. The treadmills are fitted with O2 vaporizers. A chatbot embedded within the Equinox Fitness Clubs mobile app offers workout reminders. Members can use the app to book group fitness, schedule personal training and access other club amenities on-demand.

More recently, Equinox launched an online community that might be best described as a social network for luxury fitness buffs.

For Equinox, all of these touchpoints serve as rich sources of member data. The company is now augmenting this ever-growing mountain of data with more data, captured from geolocating beacons that are currently being installed in the chain’s fitness facilities.

Leveraging this vast repository of data, Equinox can know an individual member’s wants, needs, preferences and behaviors as they relate to exercise and fitness and much more, as a granular level. It can guide guests in directions tailored to continuous fitness performance improvement on an individual basis. It can also serve up personalized messages and other relevant communications, and engage with members in any number of ways. The data generated from the digital programming also provides the company with a plethora of valuable consumer insights.

“Equinox architected the fitness as a lifestyle movement and Equinox Hotels is the complete manifestation of our brand promise,” declares the company on its new website. “This is high-performance living. This is a place where compromise simply doesn’t exist.” With the help of next-generation technology, Equinox may well be able to deliver on that brand promise.

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