5 top hotel business intelligence tools (+ How to pick one)

It gathers data like historical performance from sources such as your hotel’s property management system (PMS), which can be combined with data on market trends and competitor rates in other tools, to provide insights on room occupancy, pricing, and guest behavior.

In hotel revenue management, BI software plays a critical role by offering real-time data, forecasts and reporting that help hoteliers measure performance, optimize pricing, allocate inventory, predict demand and identify growth opportunities.

By analyzing this combination of factors on one platform, you can make data-driven decisions regarding your commercial strategy with the aim of maximizing revenue.

Overall, hotel business intelligence software enhances decision-making, reduces reliance on guesswork, and helps hotels stay competitive in a rapidly changing market.

So what is the ‘right platform’?

In this blog post, we look at five market leaders and outline what you should consider when choosing a tool.

5 Best Business Intelligence Tools For Hotels

At Lighthouse, we’d characterize the most important benefits of business intelligence software to be:

• The ability to better and more quickly understand total hotel performance

• Driving the right strategy - particularly when supported by artificial intelligence (AI)

• Automating hotel data collection and reporting

• Streamlining the commercial aspect of your business

By implementing a powerful business intelligence solution, these benefits will lead to increased occupancy rates and drive revenue, by providing valuable insights that you can base hotel management decisions on, with confidence.

But this all hinges on hoteliers choosing the right solution, something that must be done carefully if you want to maximize the benefits of your new tool.

Investing in a substandard solution can lead to three main issues:

• It won’t do what you want it to do, so you won’t boost your revenue

• You’ll waste a lot of time and energy trying – and failing – to make it do what you want it to do

• You could be locked into an expensive contract

But, not everything is substandard!

1. Lighthouse

Lighthouse’s Business Intelligence solution delivers all the four key benefits outlined above - quick performance insights, AI-driven strategy development, automated data collection and reporting, and streamlined operations - while working seamlessly alongside other tools in the Lighthouse range and external systems to provide a unified, comprehensive view of your data.

Digging a bit deeper, further benefits include:

• Getting the pulse on your portfolio performance, with instant clarity on all your commercial team business metrics and drilling down into the details

• Having all your future, current and historical data, all in one place – the tool slices and dices your data for actionable property, executive and portfolio-level data analysis

• Getting the edge on your competition by monitoring your portfolio pickup, spotting emerging market segment trends, and gaining new insights with AI-powered business intelligence

• Access to all of the data-driven insights, without having to labor through endless Excel spreadsheets – the tool integrates with your PMS, so you can focus on driving results, not data transfers

• Reporting made easy – you can export your findings and empower your commercial team; with Business Intelligence, static reports give way to dynamic strategy

• Smart Summaries leverage generative AI to transform complex data sets into easy-to-read daily performance summaries for you and your commercial team

• Actionable insights to drive Total Revenue Management

While it’s easy for us to discuss Lighthouse’s benefits, our four-time win in the Hotel Tech Report Awards for Best Business Intelligence is a testament to its real impact for hoteliers.

Sign up for a demo today to see it in action.

2. Siteminder

Designed to “deliver data analytics and insights to help your hotel make strategic decisions, both for the short and long term”, Siteminder’s business intelligence solution goes by the product name Insights, but it actually contains some elements that are more akin to those of rate shopping and parity solutions.

From a BI perspective, its key features boil down to:

• Channel and performance reports, offering real-time data to identify trends and optimize your pricing and distribution strategy

• Channel and country mix analysis, allowing users to discover which geographies and booking channels are working the hardest for their property and bringing in the most revenue

• Intel on pace, the information you need to optimize your demand peaks and drive more business in the low season

3. The Hotels Network

The Hotels Network's BI tool is an advanced hotel benchmarking solution designed to provide in-depth competitive data. It delivers real-time, actionable insights, enabling you to compare your hotel's performance with competitors and identify key factors driving those outcomes.

BenchDirect goes beyond basic metrics like average daily rate (ADR) or revenue per available room (RevPAR), offering a deeper understanding of successful direct booking strategies, and is designed to help optimize direct bookings and conversion rates through its powerful personalization tools and detailed analytics.

The platform also benefits from:

• Rate parity monitoring

• A/B testing gives you strategic insights to enhance marketing efforts

• Detailed performance reports

• Integration with your existing systems

Designed for hotels of all sizes, The Hotels Network’s core customer is interested in increasing direct bookings.

4. Duetto

Duetto’s BI suite is designed to enhance pricing strategies, maximize revenue and improve operational efficiency using analytics and machine learning. Its various platforms offer precise demand forecasting and dynamic pricing models, aimed at improving efficiency and accuracy.

Of note is its Scoreboard forecasting tool, with features including:

• Open Pricing and advanced automation, which simplifies revenue management tasks

• Customizable reports and interactive dashboards, which provide business insights

• Integration of detailed folio-level data, along with historical, current and future rate information, which supports informed decision-making

Duetto’s solutions are built with all hotel sizes in mind.

5. Hotel Cloud

Hotel Cloud Analytics is a revenue management system that offers a full suite of tools to streamline hotel operations, improve decision-making, and boost revenue. It provides real-time analytics and smooth data integration, giving you quick insights to make more informed rate management choices.

Key features include:

• Its ability to automate marketing campaigns and track their performance across multiple properties, making it ideal for managing larger portfolios – although it can be used by smaller hotels too

• Detailed, up-to-the-minute data, with which you can fine-tune pricing strategies to maximize profitability

• Automation, which lessens manual tasks, allowing staff to focus on enhancing guest experiences

Key considerations for choosing a hotel business intelligence solution

Choosing a business intelligence solution for your hotel can be a complex process that you need to get right.

You will need to check that the contenders offer everything you need by cross-referencing their websites with neutral third parties and reviewers, and requesting demos.

Deciding on everything you need can be tricky, though.

Our advice is to reflect on three high-level considerations: support access, integration capabilities and essential features.

We’ll deal with each of them in turn.

Support access

The first is simple: even with the best solutions, you occasionally need a bit of hand-holding, particularly when you’re onboarding.

So, familiarize yourself with each company’s customer service teams in terms of operating hours, languages spoken and ways in which support is offered – is it over the phone? By chatbot? By email? The more options and the greater the flexibility, the better.

Integration

The second, integration, is a bit more involved.

Effective data integration is a key element of any BI solution, as it merges data from systems like your PMS and revenue management system (RMS) into one cohesive view, creating a single source of truth.

The more effectively your BI solution integrates with multiple systems and external data sources, the more comprehensive your understanding of your business will be.

For instance, Lighthouse Business Intelligence can combine your RMS forecast with on-the-books (OTB) reservations and actual performance data to provide a detailed outlook.

From there, the BI solution can analyze and break down this diverse data to generate actionable insights, enabling more informed decisions and strategic planning.

In the case of Lighthouse’s own solution, note that, over time, it will expand to integrate with additional financial and digital marketing management tools, driving even greater efficiencies.

Essential features

When it comes to (other) essential features, the third of our high-level considerations, the list varies across hotels, but commonly includes these 10 items:

• A system-agnostic or brand-neutral integration approach

• Predictive data analytics

• Artificial Intelligence

• Customization

• Up-to-date, automated reporting

• In-depth segmentation

• Automated performance updates

• Cloud-based software

• User-friendly interface

• Customer support – as we also mention above

We discuss these points in more detail in this recent blog post, 11 Essential features to look for in a business intelligence tool.

Learn why leading hotels trust Lighthouse for business intelligence

Lighthouse is a clear hospitality industry leader. But our prowess in business intelligence isn’t something we say without basis; it’s recognized on the ground by the hotel industry.

As Jeff Hinkle, VP of Revenue Management at Stonebridge Companies, highlights, “Business Intelligence’s live insights and automated reports have transformed the revenue manager role from being a report puller to being a strategist that actively shapes our properties’ performance.”

Echoing this transformation, David Gill, Director of Revenue Management at Silverado Resort and Spa, underscores the operational efficiencies Business Intelligence brings to his team: “Business Intelligence gives you all the critical factors for revenue positioning in one platform. We can see operational hard dollar improvements in time. I have a revenue analyst who no longer has to put two hours into building a report.”

Lighthouse Business Intelligence turns your data into a user-friendly, dynamic dashboard that delivers insights into all of your business metrics, empowering you to make strategic decisions that drive results.

Find out how you can leverage the power of Lighthouse Business Intelligence to maximize your revenue growth - request a demo today.