The battle over trusted and consolidated data

By Chirstopher Meignier - Founder & CEO of Blent.io

The business intelligence and analytics market in the hospitality industry has come a long way. It started with on-premise servers, which were challenging to manage for both IT teams and operational staff. I remember having to go into the basement of my first hotel to change the layout of the Micros POS interface. I never received the benefits of the analytics of the equipment. The data was present, but it was difficult to extract insights from it.

The business intelligence and analytics market in the hospitality industry has come a long way. It started with on-premise servers, which were challenging to manage for both IT teams and operational staff. I remember having to go into the basement of my first hotel to change the layout of the Micros POS interface. I never received the benefits of the analytics of the equipment. The data was present, but it was difficult to extract insights from it.

Thankfully, the Era of data democratization began with the advent of cloud-based solutions like Mews, which made data more accessible and consumable. The industry also saw a shift towards "open API" and "Integration Marketplace," enabling greater efficiency and synchronization of data. But despite these advancements, the hospitality industry still lacks a 360-degree view of its business. To fill this gap, specific business intelligence tools for the hospitality sector were developed, allowing for a more informed and efficient use of data.

Today, the industry is at a transitional point, offering a new, agile way for hospitality businesses to merge all their data from various touchpoints. Tools like Salesforce, Tableau, and PowerBI have helped synchronize data visualization for many companies. But there remains a need for a more specialized tool that can handle the vast ecosystem of tools used by hoteliers, including PMS, POS systems, mobile ordering solutions, and more.

The Importance of Real-Time Analytics

Consumers today expect real-time updates to inform their decisions, and this is reflected in popular realtime solutions like Uber, AirBnb, Google, Booking.com, and Citymapper. The same level of insight is just as critical in the hospitality industry, where decisions made by employees, partners, and customers can greatly impact the bottom line. In this industry, analytics insights are no longer a luxury but a necessity for competitiveness, both in internal workflows and customer-facing applications.

At Blent, we have a strong community of hospitality data experts, and as the founder of the company, I have the opportunity to engage with them regularly. This community, composed of hotel managers, revenue experts, and finance directors, is united in their goal to improve efficiency and identify new revenue streams. I believe that in the near future, we will see the emergence of new roles such as efficiency and revenue stream managers.

Making data accessible

Also, we understand the importance of making data accessible to teams who can effectively use it to drive business outcomes. Despite the increasing availability of data, we have found that only a small percentage of it is integrated into the tools and workflows of teams, leading to a gap in analytics adoption. Head office teams often make decisions based on assumptions and hypotheses, lacking insight and understanding of day-to-day operations. By making data easily accessible, we aim to empower teams with the information they need to drive efficiency and identify new revenue streams.

Companies taking action

When working for McDonald’s, they used to heavily optimize ‘Recommended Items’ and ‘Suggestive Sell’ recommendations across digital menu boards and generate incremental average checks through business intelligence. This simple action has been able to add cents or even a few euros which when multiplied by the number of properties can represent billions of incremental revenues.

Another example is Michel Reybier Hospitality. The team was pulling several reports and manually combining them to create an Excel report that would then be sent out to all properties. Without modernizing their business intelligence, they would have continued to do time-consuming Excel reports and the increased chance for human error. Michel Reybier needed to find the right data stack to eliminate unnecessary processes under one reporting system to drive the efficiency of their teams.

Five Guys, a pretty well-known QSR company, wanted to get data into the hands of end users at the speed of business for ad hoc data needs. Blent Business Intelligence made it easy for all Five Guys end-business users and operation efficiency to search data and uncover the insights needed to adapt quickly to business changes.

Launching Blent

Launching Blent in 2019, we aimed to provide a comprehensive solution for the hospitality industry. Blent connects all digital touchpoints of a modern hospitality company and consolidates data into a single platform, making it accessible to the finance, F&B, revenue management teams, and more. Our goal is to create a Business Intelligence and Analytics tool for hospitality businesses that simplifies data analysis and understanding.