Why is hotel data standardization important for travel businesses

When you work in a multi-sourcing environment, you happen to gather hotel data from various suppliers, bed banks, and wholesalers. Each supplier shares hotel data in its predefined style, which leads to inconsistent and duplicate data in the OTA’s hotel inventory. This duplicate data makes it difficult for OTAs to sell the right properties to their customers, leading to a lost booking opportunity. This is where it becomes essential to standardize data and make it usable for all business requirements. In this blog, we will learn everything about hotel data standardization and why it’s essential for all travel businesses. 

What is hotel data standardization? 

Picture this: You work with three suppliers and have received hotels in Chicago from each supplier. Unfortunately, the suppliers have shared similar hotel properties in Chicago, leading to duplicate data in your database. Added to this, each supplier has shared the hotels in their own format, creating a frustrating experience for your business. This is where data standardization comes into the picture and is a must-have for every travel business. 

Hotel data standardization is the process of transforming inconsistent hotel data into a consistent and similar format. Think of data standardization as a process to organize your cluttered database. With this step, you are formatting your data to create consistency across your inventory. It optimizes data quality while making data easier to track, analyze and detect errors.  

Why is hotel data standardization essential? 

Every travel company must include hotel data standardization as a part of its data management strategy. Without this, the business could work with unreliable data that might cause a rise in operational costs, misinformed business decisions, and dissatisfied customers. When all the data collected from multiple sources is transformed into a similar format, that data becomes easy to read and makes better business decisions. Here are reasons why data standardization is a must-have: 

• Display accurate hotel information on your platform 
• Prepare data for business intelligence and analytics  
• Error-free business operations with consolidated data, free from duplicates 
• Improved productivity within the teams 
• Offers data transparency 
• Homogenous data across the systems 
• Better customer satisfaction and customer experience 

Hotel data standardization with Vervotech 

In general data standardization process involves the following steps: 

• Get/acquire or download the source data from multiple sources 
• Perform a data audit 
• Declutter data sources 
• Define data standards for hotel data formats 
• Data cleansing for accurate and properly formatted data 
• Standardize new and existing data in your database 
• Deliver the data 
• Repeat the process again and keep the data updated 

Let’s take an example of how Vervotech standardizes hotel data shared by its clients. Here, we have chosen Hotel Wallace in Paris, France. The hotel information shared by various hotel providers is in its unique format. For example, one of the providers has shared as 

Hôtel Wallace Paris 
89 Rue Fondary 75015 Paris,Rue Fondary , PARIS, FR 

Whereas another known provider has the hotel information as 

Wallace 
89 rue Fondary, 75015 Paris , Paris, FR 

Both the hotels are the same, but there isn’t a standard format. This can affect OTA’s database and lead to duplicates. Here Vervotech Hotel Mapping tool plays a crucial role. Powered by AI and machine learning, the Vervotech Hotel Mapping process works as  

• Data collection
• Data sanitization
• Data validation
• Removes duplicates
• Data standardization
• Data processing
• Accurately mapped hotel data

Through the AI-based tool, we ensure our client’s inventory has standardized hotel information. For the above example, our tool displays 

Hotel Wallace 
89 Rue Foundry, Paris, 1253, FR, 75015 

Along with the correct hotel name and address, we showcase 40+ attributes, including star ratings, geocodes, hotel phone numbers, facilities, and much more. Below is our dashboard with standardized hotel information. 

Image:  Vervotech client portal 

Conclusion 

Data standardization is a must for every travel company. Consistent and uniform hotel data will only lead to better conversions, customer experience and enable informed business decisions. Remember to account for all your data sources and standardize external sources and existing data. For all of this, Vervotech can help you achieve high-quality data standards. Once you partner with Vervotech, you can take your data strategy to new heights.