NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Data is a key part of understanding hotel performance and travel trends, but it's not always exactly the most exciting subject.

In a session on fostering a data-driven culture at the 2023 Hotel Data Conference, travel industry and data science experts spoke about how they work with their internal teams and external partners to help them understand the data they're working with and to get excited about trying different approaches to using data.

It’s important to communicate the data without compromising the data, said Conrad Braganza, senior manager of research for Sonoma County Tourism. The key to that is knowing that the data itself isn’t the key thing; rather, it’s the meaning behind the data.

“Data cannot tell its own story,” he said. “Where our roles really come in is to really be the storyteller behind that.”

Communicating the data is both an art and a science, he said. Taking a storytelling approach has been helpful in structuring how to share the data with others. There’s a buildup, a conflict and a resolution, and that can work for presentations and building PowerPoint decks.

Oftentimes when people present data, they’ll present it in blocks and chunks followed by conclusions and recommendations, Braganza said. They should flip that.

“Do all your conclusions right in the beginning and then use your slides as all your supporting materials that basically say, ‘This is why I told you this at the beginning,’” he said. “That kind of approach brings people back to originally what you were talking about. It reminds them what the whole point of the story was.”

It’s easy to collect a lot of data to then base decisions on and derive insights from, said Lisa Targonski, director of commercial services for Elder Research. However, if the data isn’t clean going in, no one is going to trust those insights and it won’t be relevant to the stakeholders.

“Garbage in, garbage out,” she said.

Getting people excited about data is helpful, but it’s so multifaceted, she said. There’s a competence piece, and it’s possible to teach people how to be more data literate. They also need to be confident in the way they’re being asked to use data for their jobs.

For some, that means learning a new programming language or doing pivot tables, she said. For others, that might just be interpreting the graphs that someone else has prepared. The combination of having conversations to make it less scary, the training piece and then giving them opportunities to apply it can potentially lead to an “a-ha” moment, she said.

IHG Hotels & Resorts has a lot of franchised and managed hotels that have created their own spreadsheets, and the general managers or other decision-makers have become accustomed to seeing things a specific way, said Wes Anderson, regional vice president of revenue management at IHG. Presenting solutions upfront, and providing information that is solutions-oriented, has been useful in getting buy-in when introducing something new.

His group has a culture of trial, Anderson said. A trial requires a change and then a measurement and timeline to apply measurable results.

“If you can show that things are moving either the way or better with new approaches, new data, pivot points or whatever, then you get buy-in,” he said.

People can get scared of learning and using a new system, said Linda Gulrajani, vice president of revenue strategy and distribution at Marcus Hotels & Resorts. The goal is to get them used to it, so she has had her team spend a lot of time together so they can talk with each other in hopes that younger team members could get older members excited about it and learn about the new tools.

That can be difficult, especially as different hotel brands use different systems, and independent hotels can each use their own, she said. Sometimes that means they find the systems they’re most comfortable with and presenting data in a way they’re most comfortable with.

Gulrajani's team will have quarterly commercial calls with every hotel in the portfolio, she said. When they find something they like that one hotel is doing, they strongly encourage others to use the same format.

“Hopefully, they want to do what we like, so we don’t mandate it, but it’s sometimes slow and hard to do,” she said.

Gulrajani said she recently took over some food-and-beverage reporting. When she went out into the field to share information, the teams she met with weren’t ready for the data. She figured out how to make the data more digestible for them so they could change their business by looking at it and seeing how easy it was to access on their own.

“I'm slowly getting ‘a-ha moments’ where they're starting to understand that there's a lot more data out there than the [profit-and-loss report], and it's really interesting and really can change how they manage their business,” she said.

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