Through numerous conversations with hotel tech executives, brand C-suites and owners over the course of 2024, when asked about what to prioritize on the technology front for 2025, the most common answer is simply, “Data.”
While many may expect or hope for the response to dwell on something buzzier like generative AI, the truth is that poking under the hood of most hotels’ tech stacks reveals a tangled mess of siloed data storage and disparate one-way or two-way integrations. Getting all the data centralized into one warehouse or uniformly structured in a data lake using a middleware layer thus represents the foremost task that precedes any sort of higher-level analysis, machine learning, business models or personalization at scale. So universal is the need for proper data piping that one can inarguably declare 2025 as the ‘Year of the Data’ for hotels.
This is why it is interesting to follow-up on the latest article from Amazon Business which highlights why procurement data is key is hospitality. While technologists are already contending with the challenges of getting all guest data cleaned and merged into a customer data platform (CDP) – and then potentially into the customer relationship management (CRM) – many facets of purchasing operations would be far more applicable for interfacing with business intelligence (BI) platforms that are also tabulating capital assets and labor activities.
For context, the greater trend happening behind the scenes – in tandem with the push for more real-time data connections – is the amalgamation of various departments into one overarching commercial team that can better coordinate actions within the rooms division, marketing, sales and other departments. For these officers, it’s not a matter of having more data (there’s already plenty!) but having a clearer picture of how various operational activities correlate with each other as informed by siloed data extracts into transformed and merged large data sets.
Hence, the first benefit of data centralization as it relates to procurement is simple transparency. Even before developing an engine for actionable insights or an automated process based off those inferences, being able to observe the signal within all that noise can yield profound advantages for cost savings, improved forecasting or other strategic drivers – for instance, enhanced sustainable procurement to further propel a brand’s perception as eco-friendly.
To drill a bit deeper on the benefits of structuring procurement data with other enterprise-level planning systems, the important consideration for prioritizing this particular task for 2025 is that many of advantages from tighter tail spend controls or working with fewer, cost-effective suppliers so often seem innocuous by themselves but can compound in far greater cost and time efficiencies.
Five areas where hotels can benefit include:
Identifying cost saving opportunities without compromising quality of goods, such as supplier consolidation to augment bargaining power
Better forecasting and budgeting, especially with respect to demand accuracy to prevent shortages or overstocking
Improved SCM benchmarking within a managed asset or ownership portfolio
Clarity on delivery timing to uncover hidden inventory or labor costs
Streamlining clerical work and manual data entry to prevent errors and boost productivity overall
If you could solve for each of those five (and others) over the year ahead through enhanced data integrations to realize only, say, a 1% marginal gain, those quick wins would easily stack up into a far greater sum. And this cumulative total would then give your organization the wiggle room it needs to deploy resources elsewhere in a manner that evolves the property or brand in a way that’s meaningful to guests.
All told, hotel procurement is ripe for improvement and cost efficiencies, but this all starts with having the data in the right place and structured congruently so that managers can see what the best approach will be.
