Resorts Using Big Data, Analytics, and Social Media to Improve Customer Experience

Written By: An IntelliGenesis AI Specialist It seemed only appropriate for this newsletter to talk about resorts! I’ll even start with Velas Resorts. In 2011, Velas Resorts ran a promotion in which they gave away a free wedding package valued at about $13,000. To enter the contest, all you had to do was Like their Facebook page. The contest ran for about 6 weeks, and in that time they received nearly 7000 Likes, 700 Twitter followers, and thousands of page views. For reference, Doritos aired a 30 second commercial at Super Bowl 50 at a cost of $5 million, and is estimated to have gained 7000 Twitter followers. So Velas Resorts got 10% of the impact for less than 1% of the money. It’s clear that social media is a phenomenal way for smaller companies to make big leaps in building their brand. We all know that businesses are gathering and using more data than ever about their customers to provide better products and services. Hotels and resorts are no exception. What’s unique about hospitality organizations is that they can leverage this data to provide better service on an individual level.

Disney’s smart RFID wristbands are known well by vacationers. They are your room key, your ticket to rides, and more. The macro applications of this are easy to imagine. They can do smart things like measure and predict traffic at each of the rides and restaurants, allowing them to redeploy staff to handle load. But think bigger, or rather, smaller. At a micro level, your hotel manager now knows when you leave the room to enter the park, and when you’ll leave the park heading back. No more interruptions from housekeeping, they’ll know exactly when to come and when to leave. Imagine your kid is like mine and plays Frozen on a loop in your room one night. The next morning, you swipe your wristband to enter the park, and a few minutes later Elsa and Anna walk up to you and give your son or daughter a big hug and have a conversation. These are the types of things we can expect to see in the very near future as resorts continue to improve the ways they collect and use the abundance of data. Sources: https://blog.milestoneinternet.com/digital-marketing-analytics/facebook-contest-case-study/http://adage.com/article/super-bowl/10-super-bowl-50-advertisers-grew-fans-followers-likes/302660/https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/08/24/disney-uses-big-data-iot-and-machine-learning-to-boost-customer-experience/