Our CEO, Stefan Tweraser, recently made a trip to Shanghai to attend one of China's largest tourism conferences, The China Hotels & Tourism Conference, also known as CHAT. One thing Stefan and our team have noticed while working in China is the interest many hoteliers and executives there have in current trends in data management and utilizing that data to better run their teams and businesses. 

We're in the information age. There's no doubt about it. Yet, with all this data supposedly flying around us, it's hard to know just what to do with it. Even if your PMS is collecting all the right stats, you're on top of your web traffic and social media interactions, and you know what your comp set is up to, it can be hard to understand how to actually read the data. What does it mean? And more importantly how can you use it to make better decisions? 

"Data" is an intimidating word for many people. And "Big Data" continues to be a hot topic for many industries, hospitality included. But what do these terms actually mean? Why should hotels even care about their data in the first place? Because data is really just information– information that is the backbone of good business intelligence.