HOSPITALITY: Faster, Better Reporting with a Global In-house Solution

fifty-five has worked with this world-leading hotel group to build a media reporting suite that fuses inputs from multiple agencies with in-house and third-party sources into an automated dashboard. This new platform drives business decisions and efficiency across 40 countries and over 2,500 hotel properties, with cutting-edge cloud computing tools ensuring the highest levels of data quality and freshness to guarantee the most accurate reports possible, benefitting the hotel group’s e-commerce and advertising clients and supporting hotel managers in their local marketing decision-making.

Moving Reporting In-House for Speedier, More Responsive Insights 

This international hotel owner used a third-party reporting toolset that drove media and e-commerce decision-making for over 2,500 hotels across Europe, MEA (Middle East and Africa), and Asia-Pacific regions. Aligning all stakeholders on their plans and business results was critical.

However, the solution was slow and inflexible - reports were ready for analysis long after the end of the reporting period, with adjustments to the data taking four days to be input and recalculated. Seeing this challenge as an opportunity to transform its media reporting across the EMEA and AsiaPacific regions, the client decided to move to an in-house Google Cloud-based architecture.

The objectives were:

• Building a repository of media investments responsive to hotel managers’ needs and incorporating all of the digital channels spends
• Embedding booking and revenue data into the reports
• Dramatically accelerating the speed of reporting.

Utilizing Data to Tailor a Cloud-Based, Automated Platform

fifty-five built a solution within the client’s Google Cloud Platform facility to provide cloud-based data acquisition and processing, fueling a variety of media and e-commerce reporting tools. These tools align costs with web traffic and room sales across hundreds of individual hotels.

Data governance and quality check routines were enforced using a mix of automation, API integration, and change management, including:

• Leveraging GCP tools to manage the data sources, including agency, publisher, and analytics reports.
• Feeding data through API connectors, enabling automated feeds to be processed in Google BigQuery.

Continuous integration, deployment, and testing enabled real-time checks across various active pipelines, ensuring reliable version control across the development, staging, and production environments.

Numerous automated checks ensured accuracy and alignment with budget figures, while ingestion alerts immediately identified data source discrepancies, decreasing the risk of a single point of failure and localizing issues.

Cloud-based automations allowed parallel jobs to run simultaneously, speeding up processing and quality checks. Data reliability was ensured through the standalone processing of media owner and agency data pipelines in separate data projects. The resultant tables and datasets enabled real-time access to the reports and various visualization tools to draw on the data.

Cross-Team Improvements Through Performance Visibility and Data-Fueled Insights

• Consolidated media reporting for over 2500 hotels in 40 markets across EMEA and APAC within Google Cloud Platform
• Automated feeds from 30 different platforms, media owners, and agencies, including Search and Affiliates, Programmatic, Video, and Social Media sources
• Reporting times reduced from 4 days to under 3 hours.

By utilizing over 220 data sources from over 30 channels and agencies, the hotel owner has significantly improved the range of media platforms, search partners, and affiliates incorporated in the MediaHub reporting.  

Benefits for the hotel owner’s stakeholders include:

• For Hotel Managers, a view of their hotel’s campaign performance, understanding how client investments are supporting their joint objectives
• For the E-commerce Team, an understanding of budget allocation and performance by property, locality, and more
• For Media Buyers, Campaign performance stats at an aggregated level and understanding of budget availability
• For Analysts, access to property-level data, the ability to share analysis easily with various stakeholders, and complex search access to performance data.