3 essential data practices for improving your hotel’s website strategies

 November 21, 2019    Administrator     Online Marketing    79


Are you involved in improving the performance of your hotel website’s direct revenue contributions? If so, you probably make data-driven decisions every day. This will likely involve dealing with web analytics, booking engine revenue data, Ad platforms, or similar tools.

Crucial to this role is understanding ‘data integrity’ (or ‘data governance’). But are you sure what steps are needed to fulfill this vital part of your role? The following post is designed to help.

We’ll describe how monitoring, maintaining, validating, and questioning your website data is key to having successful data practices and making better decisions around your hotel strategies.

Why Data Standardization is Crucial for Success

The discussion of data standardization is essential in the hotel industry, especially when it comes to the performance of hotel websites and booking engines.

However, there is currently no standard for data accuracy or integrity with hotel websites.

Many hotels strive for more direct web contributions since the cost of acquisition is usually much cheaper than the OTAs. But what most web vendors won’t reveal is that their web analytics implementations can be manipulated to tell better data stories to their clients.

Imagine that you’re making decisions about your website and direct business based on neatly plucked and curated data. Would that be helpful or hurtful? Good data practices may be the one thing that separates you from your competition, and there is currently no standard for data accuracy or integrity with hotel websites.

The fact that each web agency may have different implementation setups for their web analytics tracking, in and of itself, has major implications that reverberate throughout the industry.

Potential problems include:
- How would you know if your website is getting accurate traffic or revenue numbers?
- How would you compare web agencies and their track records with conversion rates?
- How would you know if your digital marketing efforts were actually working?

The Pillars of Data Standards

At Travel Tripper and Pegasus Solutions, we strive for data standardization. There is a mindset that needs to be adopted and promoted to ensure the following fundamentals:

1. Data Governance: Data should be governed by one full admin group to avoid the “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome.

2. Data Validation: Data needs to be validated between sources and against a universal truth to ensure its accuracy. Often, this is the CRS or booking engine.

3. Data Integrity: This applies to the maintenance, consistency, and transparency of data. Data should be monitored frequently, made stable using a uniform practice, and communicated honestly.

Cr.www.pegs.com