"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.

As hoteliers we don’t always consider data to be a fundamental tool in our daily operations. We’d rather focus on making our guests happy than crunching numbers. So why does data matter to hotels? Because at the end of the day data is just information. When we look at the right data in the right way, we can not only ensure our guests are having a great stay, but we can optimize revenues, occupancy, and organizational efficiency.

There’s a lot of data out there.

Think about it: Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created. In fact, 90% of all data in the world was created in the last two years.* But just because we have this amazing quantity of data doesn’t mean we automatically know more. We still need to make sense of data in useful and meaningful ways. We need top-level, understandable takeaways.