Fixing a Problem with Hotel Booking Data

Uncategorized

Jan 2

“Data is the currency of the future”. We’ve all heard this time and time again. Data propels a business forward, it is what drives a company’s value. But if you keep saying it is the currency of the future, then you miss the fact that is the primary driver of business today. For Travel Management Companies, Corporate Travel Departments and businesses, at most we want our data to be robust, insightful and useful. And at least, we want our data to be consistent and correct.

The Problem

When it comes to hotel booking information, there has been a longstanding problem with its data. Information for a single hotel property (name, address, phone number, etc) can be input in various ways across different systems – even though it is for a singular physical location. Because of this, without cleaning and normalizing this data, it becomes nearly impossible to accurately analyze and report on bookings at individual hotel properties.

The Solution

GraspDATA is our flagship product. It is a powerful, web-based business intelligence and reporting tool. We understand that when it comes to travel data management, the future is here. The data exists and our tool allows for all your travel data to be integrated into an easy-to-use platform. Within GraspDATA, we have introduced GraspSNAP, a tool that collapses the various address aliases for a hotel property into a single master hotel property to allow for more accurate hotel reporting.

How Does it Work?

There are typically three pieces of information about a hotel – name, address and phone number. And their entry and accuracy entirely depends on the agent. Any or all of these could be accurate (or not), so all three are taken into account when determining the hotel’s location.

For example:

Hotel name can be abbreviated, misspelled or missing words in the name.

Address can be exact, of relative, such as “London” without a street address, or incorrect.

Phone number can be missing digits, be completely wrong or non-existent.

Distinct hotel name/address/phone number are geocoded (normalized) and GraspSNAP then collapses them into a single master hotel property. The data is then used for enriching hotel vendor information for reporting.