Chapter 24
Hospitality and Travel
In This Chapter
Gaylord Hotels
Intercontinental Hotel Group
“Are you traveling for business or pleasure?” This simple question can’t possibly describe the very complex market segmentation that exists in the travel industry today. Consider just a few examples of various types of accommodations or travel experiences: green hotels and eco-focused travel, high-end luxury spas and resorts in exotic and remote locations, trendy new pod hotels offering budget travelers tiny sleeping spaces with shared common areas, and grand all-inclusive resorts catering to business events. Many of the largest hotel-management companies operate multiple brands, catering to a broad range of these varied market segments. Intense competition and a high rate of mergers and acquisitions have contributed to an environment where a diverse group of hotel properties are managed by one parent company. In the past, large hotel-management companies commonly included individual hotels or groups of hotels that functioned as independent business units. But what happens when you want to optimize profitability and improve customer satisfaction and guest loyalty across all brands within the enterprise?
A large, distributed hotel organization can find it impossible to leverage all the important information it’s collected about guests and hotel properties if the data is highly distributed and inconsistent. Typically, information about guest preferences, customer billing, spa services, ...
