Do I think we need to remind ourselves that the way hospitality should be respectful and noble in how we manipulate, interpret, extrapolate, and use all this data, in lieu of guest privacy and respecting them? Yes. Yes I do. I am going to ask our travel professionals an hoteliers to think deeply about how they want to treat a guest – and to understand their is a difference between understanding their datas, and using it to manipulate them. The pace of business is too fast for people to have gotten to this last sentence, but those that did might proactively walk forward into the world of big data with respect to the people that choose to keep our hotels in business. The hotel business is conservative for a reason – we don’t have the money to get burned on trying new ideas. If you exploit your guest’s data in a way that burns bridges, no amount of data analysis will ever fill your hotel again.

Cheers and good day! Your friendly neighborhood Hotelier trying to stay on top of hotel news, and travel info, and hospitality & management philosophy… oh yeah… and technology or social media. 

All this being told… I think the slide and panic is over. Our awful day at the beach is done, and what happens next is shaking out the blanket to clear the sand…. and we will see what is jarred loose from the hotel economic fabric. The problems that are still to come are not pro-longed troubles for hotels, it is simply the back end of the recession working itself out. Until then…. buckle up…. I doubt it will be too bumpy a drive home, but it’s gonna be a long ride.