The Analytics Black Hole in Hospitality: How Can the Industry Fight Back?
10 experts shared their view
The hospitality industry is at a crossroads. Overregulation, introduced under the banners of fairness and privacy, has unintentionally crippled hotels' ability to track performance and make data-driven decisions.
The fragmented nature of hotel tech stacks, with separate systems for websites and booking engines, compounds the issue. Often requiring users to opt in twice, this setup leaves up to 2/3 of booking engine traffic untracked as users refuse or ignore cookie consent prompts.
Even solutions like Consent Mode v2 or server-side tracking offer only partial relief. These technologies enable aggregated data tracking when users deny cookies, but they require seamless technical implementation and compliance alignment—a luxury many hotels lack.
The rise of generative AI in search engines adds yet another layer of complexity. AI-generated answers, unlike traditional search results, don't provide clear pathways for attribution.
So, what's the solution? How are you addressing these challenges for your clients? Is it time to demand entirely new approaches to tracking in this hyper-regulated world?
We can hope regulators will someday "reimagine" policies to enable innovation, but let's face it: this is entirely beyond the industry's control. Expecting governments to grasp the complexities of hotel tech is like waiting for a no-show guest to miraculously fill your occupancy gap.
Move on.What hotels can control is the chaos of tech fragmentation. It's time to abandon the patchwork of disconnected systems that's holding the industry back. Your website, booking engine, CRM, and PMS are not independent silos—they must communicate, share data, and function seamlessly. Ask yourself the hard question: are they?
Take something as basic as cookie policies: forcing users to accept two separate policies—one for your website and another for your booking engine—is not only outdated but absurd. Cross-domain cookie management isn't optional; it's a baseline requirement.
And while tools like Consent Mode v2 and server-side tracking are steps in the right direction, let's not kid ourselves: they're band-aids on a bullet wound. The underlying issue remains—OTAs dominate because they've mastered the golden rule:
control the data, control the market.
Technical fragmentation has long been a challenge in all aspects of hospitality. Some of this is a reality. Some of it is by choice and driven from vendor marketing propoganda about 'Best of Breed'.
The reality is that to overcome this general challenge in industry, consolidation and unification is required. This is a general condition beyond the specifics of this topic.
Why? Because our industry simply does not apply the resources needed to operate high tech effectively. Then, there is not the finanancial wherewithal to do the 'stiching' of information. Subesequently resulting in manual effort, prone to error and rarely in a timely manner ot be useful looking forward.
To solve the problem we must go to the root. Single platforms of large bodies of business process wherever possible. I hear the groans. The groans don't change the medicine dosage.
Digital is digital. Therefore to eliminate several of the scenarios Simone references we must consolidate. A single digital platform is the medicine to overcome the scenario from a day-to-day management, unification of experience, investment optimization, simplification of the digital relationship with the customer and consolidated performance across the digital landscape. It is not just customer facing. Staff solutions as well.
Website analytics in isolation from the rest of the hotel tech stack has lost its importance. Combined with the property's CRM, RMS, a personalization engine and the rest of the tech stack, it is priceless and impacts many revenue-generation functions:
Revenue Management: The website browsing behavior, booking engine denials, time spent on web pages of various packages, offers and hotel amenities are important data signals for the RMS and property pricing strategies.
CRM: An AI-powered CRM tied to the website analytics can differentiate among different sets of preferences for the same guest, based on their different reason to travel: business, family vacation, attending a wedding, buddy or girls getaway, etc. All the data signals are there, all you need is the right technology to "read the tea leaves" in an automated fashion.Personalization: At NextGuest, now part of Cendyn, we implemented a Personalization Engine on our hotel clients' websites, which dynamically changes content and rate offers based on the visitors browsing behavior, CRM data, return/new customer, feeder market origination, and over 100 different demographic attributes.
Generator of first-party data from website sign-ins, reward or loyalty program sign-ups, opt-in email sign-ups, etc. that can be used for similar audiences marketing.
Thank you for initiating a timely discussion on the topic. We can only expect sticker regulations on how businesses track and use consumer data. Today's consumers also value the privacy of their personal information and digital footprints more than before. Then, multiple but fragmented data points make it even harder to collect valuable data for data-driven decision-making. There are a few approaches we can take to address the challenge:
- Invest in APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to provide customers with an integrated experience and minimize the number of opt-ins.
- Communicate consent clearly to ease consumers' concerns about how their data are used and what benefits they can expect from sharing their data.
- Build a more robust tracking system to track user data.
- Leverage AI to optimize tracking and data analysis.
I am very interested in seeing what solutions other panel members come up with. I hope that, collectively, this panel can provide inspirational ideas for addressing this challenge.
The key is to have a technology stack specifically designed for travel customers. At Amadeus, our technology stack is connected to a centralized Media Data Warehouse with campaign, traveler, and hotel data to fuel our campaigns. These campaigns are in turn powered by AI algorithms built for travel.
By using cross-channel attribution, we have a reasonably accurate picture of how both digital advertising channels and metasearch are performing, helping make more informed decisions. Integration with new technologies, such as universal IDs, allows us to expand targeting and tracking beyond third-party cookies.
Although there will always be new technologies and regulations in the future as well as a certain degree of fragmentation, we are seeing enough stability to standardize campaign processes to ensure consistency and reliability of measurement and performance.
With the exception of a few of the major chains, hotels need to massively reconsider how they think about, and use, customer data. Even tiny retail outlets today leverage sophisticated tech-based systems to optimise operations and personalise the customer experience. In contrast, hotels keep their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge that the world has changed and that they need to make the necessary investments in systems, knowledge, and processes to tap into this tsunami, Failure to do so will be catastrophic!
Attribution has always been a challenge in hospitality long before AI entered the picture. Instead of chasing perfect attribution, hotels should focus on what they can control and what always works: high-quality content creation, diversified distribution, and first-party data. Authoritative content (on the hotel's site and from authoritative media brands) builds credibility and demand, making it more likely that a guest who encounters a hotel across multiple touchpoints will book directly. Diversified distribution ensures that marketing efforts aren't dependent on a single platform's tracking capabilities while increasing visibility across various channels. Finally, prioritizing first-party data from loyalty programs, engaging newsletters, and direct guest interactions can reduce reliance on granular analytics from third parties. Leveraging digital platforms shouldn't be about cracking an impossible attribution puzzle but creating a marketing ecosystem that helps hotels own more guest relationships, first-party data, and insight into the path to purchase.
It may feel like privacy regulation and changing technology platforms hurt hoteliers' ability to understand their business. But you must start by remembering that analytics solely exist to help you make better decisions. The problem isn't
Do we have the right tracking?It'sWhat can help us make the right decisions?This is far from a new problem. In the early days of digital — to say nothing of the dark ages before digital — tracking was limited and often non-existent. Savvy marketers learned, though, how to use the data they did have to understand their customers and their business. Marketing mix modeling, holdback tests, and statistical models aided decision-making — and produced useful results. Today, new technologies make similar techniques faster, easier, and far more cost effective. For instance, AI modeling of your existing data provides deeper insights from limited data and helps you learn what you need to know.
Remember, analytics exist to help you make better decisions. Tracking is just one way to understand performance. But there's an entire universe of tested solutions available that can improve your sales, marketing, and revenue optimization decisions with less data than ever before. The question now is are you ready to use them?
Investing in a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is essential – it delivers a comprehensive guest profile that goes far beyond tracking the initial booking journey. A well-implemented CDP collects data on guest spend, stay preferences, and even dining or spa interests, offering a far greater return on investment than costly custom acquisition reports or server-side conversion tracking. By understanding your guests in depth, you empower both marketing and operations to make data-driven decisions.
In the next few years, AI will further revolutionize CDPs by predicting which guests are most likely to convert and tailoring messages that resonate with much greater personalization than is currently possible. The ultimate vision? An AI-driven system that personalizes every aspect of the guest experience—from room preferences and dietary needs to curated experiences and tours—while managing privacy settings through a centralized guest interface that makes it clear to the guest what data they are sharing and how it will be used.
This integrated approach reclaims data-driven decision-making and transforms the analytics black hole into a powerful engine for growth and guest satisfaction. In a competitive hospitality landscape, leveraging the right marketing technology isn"t just smart, it"s indispensable for delivering memorable guest experiences.
As an industry there are many tools available for better analytics and insights to understand performance. However, they have neither been leveraged to the best of their ability, nor as an industry, have we maximized our own capabilities in using them.
AI search and digital assistants will dramatically evolve guest behaviour and challenge our definitions of the user journey. Therefore new approaches to tracking need to be considered. We need to ask ourselves; what are we optimizing and how do we position our content, data, and ARI to be consumed by these digital assistants. Then, define how to measure the effectiveness of these efforts - whether we take a dynamic and adaptable approach to analytics, or continue along the lines of standardization.
For today's challenges, such as cross-domain tracking, solutions exist but it’s important to rethink development ideologies to make processes easier and relatable to regulatory frameworks. There’s a risk additional tracking may not deliver the results yet incur significant development costs.
With the roll out of GA4, Google has made advancements - but it’s essential that hospitality prioritizes digital measurement solutions and simplifies the customer journey from website to checkout to fully benefit.
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