Today on the Hospitality Daily Podcast, I was joined by Joe McGroarty, Clark Brayton, and Pritesh Patel from Actabl. The three of them have spent years on a problem that has been the backdrop of my entire career in hospitality: data, and what hotels can actually do with it.
For as long as I have worked in this industry, data and the use of it, how it is processed and managed, has been a challenge across so many different contexts. With the rise of AI, that foundation matters more than ever.
So I asked each of them: What questions should a hotel operator ask their team or their tech partners now?
Here is what they said….
Where does your data live, and who owns it?
Joe shared that you need to start with the plumbing. If you do not know where your data lives, none of the other questions matter.
“If your data is all over the place, it’s not going to work. How do you standardize that data? How do you normalize that data to be able to use it? What data warehouse do you use?”
Then he said something that should resonate with anyone who has felt this inside their organization.
“It’s really hard to get the data to a place that’s really usable. And if you aren’t familiar with it, it becomes very difficult to even know where to get started.”
Most hotels are not behind on AI as much as they are behind on data. The infrastructure underneath AI is the part most operators have not been asked about yet, and it is the part that determines whether anything you use actually works.
How much time is your team spending on this?
Once you know where your data lives, the next question is what it is costing you to work with it.
“It’s all about time,” Clark said. “How much time does your IT group spend monitoring these systems that we can normalize automatically for you? How much time does your accounting team spend gathering reports, putting them together?”
Then he made the point every hotel operator knows well.
“Everything in hotels is time-sensitive. It’s one of those few things that literally expires on a daily basis. If I don’t sell that room today, I can’t sell it for yesterday tomorrow. Same thing for all your seats in your restaurant. I can’t turn back time.”
If your team is still pulling reports manually, that is time they are not spending on the floor, with guests, or on the decisions that move the business forward.
Are you confident enough to make decisions on it?
If the infrastructure is in place and your team is not buried in manual work, the last question is whether the data is good enough to act on.
Pritesh, who oversees integrations at Actabl and is a named inventor on the company’s recent U.S. patent for hotel data normalization, framed it around readiness.
“Based on what you know today about your business, your hotels, your guests, how confident are you making any staffing decisions, pricing decisions, based on the data that you have with you today?”
Staffing and pricing are the two daily decisions every hotel lives or dies on. If you are making them on hope, you have a data problem.
What to do with this
Three things to take into your next meeting with your technology team or your vendors, in the order they actually need to be answered:
- Where does our data live?
- How much time is our team currently spending wrangling data that systems should be handling automatically?
- How confident are we, today, in the data behind our decisions?
If you cannot answer those three questions cleanly, this is something you need to prioritize. Listening to Joe, Clark, and Pritesh on the Hospitality Daily Podcast is a good place to start.
