CHICAGO — While much of the discussion about data in the hotel industry revolves around straightforward performance metrics, Hyatt Hotels Corporation's Vice President of Data and Analytics Raymond Boyle said his company's approach to data is designed to tackle every issue possible across the enterprise.
Speaking with Hotel News Now, Boyle said his job is to use data to improve every function possible across the company, from culture to cybersecurity to guest experience.
"So strategically, what we're in the business to do is advance care — Hyatt is all about care — through data-driven decisions," he said. "So it's about making sure the company is data-centered and driven in the way they manage, lead and guide the development of the organization. Then it's about automation — just making sure that we are leveraging data and the sciences and machine learning to transform and automate the business over time."
One of the things Boyle is most excited about is the increasing use of machine learning and artificial intelligence "to continue to evolve our ability to care for guests and really deliver the experiences that they need," he said.
Amassing more data on guests carries both a huge opportunity and a huge challenge for hotel companies like Hyatt, he said. While it opens the door to new levels of personalization to elevate guest experience, it also requires a greater degree of security and care to build trust with those guests.
It's about "making sure that the way that we secure data and care for the assets that guests provide us permission to use in a way that creates high trust at all times," he said.
He stressed that machine learning and artificial intelligence will offer a massive gateway to personalizing guest experience from even earlier in the booking process if handled correctly.
"I think you'll see AI and machine learning be applied to the journey of guests in a pretty intense way over the next however many years," Boyle said.
The easiest application of that will be the content they see early in the booking journey.
"What properties are you going to recommend to me? How do I experience searching and looking for properties? Which offers would be right for any given person? How do we optimize the personalization?" he asked, adding guests could see unique offerings of room types, rates, experiences and add-ons such as breakfasts or early check-in.
Defining Performance
Boyle said that defining success internally or with the company's many owners is a much more complicated and intricate endeavor than just looking at traditional hotel performance metrics such as average daily rates, occupancy and revenue per available room.
He said one of the keys is deeply and thoughtfully evaluating the success of Hyatt's loyalty program — World of Hyatt — which executives do by looking at how many people are "deeply engaged in the system" and are progressing to higher levels of the program.
"It's about moving up in their relationship with Hyatt," he said. "We want people to hit milestones. You can earn certain things at different levels, so you want people to understand that and continue to sort of build their engagement with the organization."
Beyond that, he said Hyatt broadly judges guest experience as a key performance indicator — in addition to looking at the more direct revenue metrics.
The Challenge of Security
Boyle said that while data is becoming increasingly important for the success of hotel businesses, it's also ever more challenging in terms of both threats and regulations — such as Europe's General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
"The legal evolution is something that you've got to pay a tremendous amount of attention to, and we partner really closely with the cyber organization at Hyatt to translate that into policies that apply to the way we secure, protect, manage and provide access to data," he said.