Booking a hotel has become really easy in the past years. There are multiple booking engines that make it very simple to book the right hotel for your stay. Great customer experience is vital for these booking websites, as the competitor is quite often just one click away.
Therefore, Hotels.com is using Big Data to create the best customer experience to ensure that visitors book via Hotels.com and not via another booking website. In this interesting video, Thierry Bedos, CTO at Hotels.com, explains how they have embedded Big Data within their organization to upgrade the booking experience for their customers.
Customers‘ expectations have risen in the past few years. Customers much better know what they want and they expect to receive that when they book a hotel in terms of different features and the speed at which the website operates and delivers those features. Customers want a relevant and meaningful experience that is consistent through any channel and they want instant response or otherwise they go to the competitor. This of course is valid for any online organization and therefore any online organization should take a Big Data approach.
As Thierry Bedos explains in this video, Hotels.com have gone through a number of steps and have adopted Big Data as a technology and implemented several use cases. They have reached a stage where Big Data becomes business as usual and becomes useful in everything they do.
Collecting data is of course an important aspect of the job, but just collecting the data is not enough. You need to exploit the data, see what you can get out of the data and proof that you can deliver value through that data. For Hotels.com this means understanding how many people look at a hotel, social proofing to validate choices and create this consistent experience.
One of the challenges they face in embedding Big Data within their organization is finding the right resources in terms of people and technology. Fortunately the industry is maturing rapidly and platforms such as Datafloq enable companies to find the right technology and find the right skilled people.
As Thierry Bedos continues to explain, within Hotels.com no single department owns Big Data. One of their challenges is to educate the business about the possibilities of Big Data and therefore the business is part of the whole stack of Big Data, since they are the ones who can benefit from Big Data. This has resulted that everyone is involved in Big Data at Hotels.com, just as it should be.
