The Questions Your Manual Can’t Answer
The key to becoming data-driven isn’t building a massive dashboard; it’s learning to reframe your questions. Your experience gives you the broad “gut-feel” questions. Your data helps you ask sharper, more specific questions that drive real action. Let’s look at five examples.
1. The “Competitive Rate” vs. The “Truly Profitable Guest”
Your gut asks: “Are our weekend rates competitive?”
Your data asks: “What is the true profitability of my ‘discounted-package’ guest vs. my ‘full-rate’ transient guest?”
Think about it. The guest who books your “Bed & Breakfast” package looks great on paper—they fill a room. But what if your data showed that when you factor in their F&B spend, spa usage, and the exact housekeeping cost for that room type, you’re actually losing money on that guest compared to the transient guest who paid $30 more but spent $150 at the bar? Your data can tell you which guest types and rate codes actually contribute to your bottom line, not just your occupancy report.
2. The “Working Campaign” vs. The “Profitable Channel”
Your gut asks: “Are my marketing campaigns working?”
Your data asks: “Which marketing channel brings me guests with the highest Total Revenue Per Available Room (TRevPAR) and the lowest Cost of Acquisition (CAC)?”
You’re spending money on OTAs, Google Ads, and email newsletters. You know they’re bringing in bookings, but are they the right bookings? Your data can connect the dots. It can tell you that the guests from “Email Campaign X” have a 50% higher average F&B spend than guests from “OTA Y.” You might discover you’re spending $10,000 to attract guests who only deliver $8,000 in total profit. This isn’t about turning off marketing; it’s about aiming your marketing dollars at the channels that deliver real value.
Your gut asks: “Is the front desk team doing a good job?”
Your data asks: “Is there a correlation between which front desk agent checks a guest in and that guest’s final satisfaction score and their likelihood to upgrade?”
Your guest satisfaction scores provide a team average, but the actionable insights are found in the details. Your PMS and survey data can reveal that one agent, Jane, has a 30% higher success rate on paid upgrades, and her guests consistently rate their “arrival experience” 10 points higher. Jane is your hidden superstar. You can now quantify her skill and have her train the rest of the team, turning her individual talent into a new standard for everyone.
4. The “Efficient” vs. The “Predictive” Operation
Your gut asks: “Is housekeeping efficient?”
Your data asks: “Which of my room types generate the most maintenance requests, and is there a pattern?”
You know your team is working hard, but data can make them work smarter. By combining data from housekeeping, your PMS, and your maintenance logs, you can stop just reacting to problems. Your data might show that the AC units in your 3rd-floor suites are 80% more likely to fail in July. Now you can schedule preventative maintenance in June, before it ruins a VIP guest’s stay, saves you a service recovery comp, and prevents a negative review.
Your gut asks: “Is the lobby bar a popular spot?”
Your data asks: “What is the average spend per occupied room at my lobby bar, and what percentage of my in-house guests ever visit it?”
The bar might look busy, but who is it busy with? Your POS data can tell you. You might find that it’s a convenient spot for locals, while 90% of your high-paying in-house guests are walking across the street for their pre-dinner drink. This single insight changes everything. The question is no longer “How do we make the bar busier?” but “How do we capture the 90% of in-house revenue we’re currently leaking to our competitor?”
From “Dirty Reports” to Automated Answers: The Real “How-To”
This all sounds great, but let’s be realistic. You’re a GM, not a full-time data analyst. You don’t have time to dig through Excel sheets every day, and your “data buddy” in finance is just as busy.
The “dirty report” is a fine starting point to prove the value of a question, but it’s not a long-term solution. The moment a crisis hits, that manual report is the first thing you’ll drop.
If you’re serious about this transition, the goal must be automation.
The proper, sustainable solution is a dedicated Hotel Business Intelligence (BI) system. Its entire job is to automatically connect your separate data silos—your PMS, POS, guest surveys, maintenance logs, and labor schedules—and put the curated answers on a single dashboard, immediately.
Here’s how you get there, not in one giant leap, but in manageable, strategic steps.
- Step 1: Use Your “One Question” to Build a Business Case. Don’t ask your owners or HQ for “a BI system”; that’s too vague. Instead, pick your most painful question from the list above. Ask your team to help you answer just that one question, just one time. Yes, this is the one-time “dirty report.” But when you find that “Aha!” moment—that Jane is your upsell star, or that you’re leaking 90% of your bar revenue—you’ve just put a dollar-and-cents value on an answer.
- Step 2: Present the Problem, Not the “Nice-to-Have.” You now have a powerful business case. You’re no longer saying, “I’d like a new data toy.” You’re saying, “I have proven we are blind to a $100k revenue opportunity, and our current systems are not built to spot this. We need an automated tool to fix it.”
- Step 3: Start with Basic Functions and Grow. A modern BI solution isn’t all-or-nothing. You don’t need to boil the ocean. The best approach is to start by automating the answers to your most valuable and frequently asked questions. Connect your PMS and POS. Master that. Get your team comfortable using that one dashboard to track guest profitability. Once it’s part of your daily rhythm, you can add the next layer—housekeeping, labor, or guest satisfaction. This way, you’re building a data-driven culture, one answer at a time.
Conclusion: Your Experience is the “Why,” Data is the “Proof”
- Bring it all together: Being data-driven doesn’t mean you trade your 20 years of experience for a spreadsheet.
- The New “Superpower”: It means you supercharge your experience. Data doesn’t replace your gut feeling; it informs it.
- The Vision: The data-driven GM is the one who can walk into an ownership meeting and say:
“I’m not just feeling like we should renovate the lobby bar. I know we should, because the data shows we’re ‘leaking’ 60% of our potential guest revenue to the restaurant next door, and a $100k investment has a projected payback of 18 months.”
- Call to Action: What is the one question you’re going to ask your data this week?
