How to Optimize Hotel Management with Cross-Organizational Data

The Benefit of Multi-Site Video Analytics

Whether it be two locations or 200, hotels with multiple sites have unique video analytics needs. They not only require the ability to record video locally on-site but also need to aggregate and manage data insights across all their sites to optimize the guest experience.

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Video Analytics Beyond Security

Although many organizations think of video surveillance as a physical security resource, leveraging an existing surveillance system can help hotel chains understand and compare trends across multiple sites. The result: hotel management can act on intelligent, informed decisions that benefit departments beyond security, like marketing, customer experience and service, hospitality, and operations. With video analytics deployed across multiple sites, metadata generated at one site is pushed to a central hub for real-time monitoring and cross-site KPI tracking through centralized research dashboards.

Sight Level Insight – Broad Application

As the saying goes, “act locally, think globally.” The same concept can and should be applied to hotel chains interested in enhancing security, operations, and customer experience.

For example, video analytics can tell management a host of information at a site-level — bottlenecks at check-in, crowding in lobbies and recreational areas, and even common path routes that visitors take as they interact with the property. This information can help a single location make informed decisions regarding staffing, signage, and more, but when aggregated across multiple sites, video analytics can tell a complete story.

Hotels can use video analytics to generate visual heatmaps, charts, and graphs to illustrate pedestrian traffic volumes and navigation patterns to understand if their issue with guests finding their rooms is an isolated issue or organization wide design flaw. Comparing insights from multiple sites can help an organization determine a simple solution – such as increase directional signage – can resolve the issue, or if site layout changes need to be made to future design plans so foot traffic flows easily.

Even local security incidents can provide data to drive organizational change. Security teams can, for instance, leverage video analytics like real-time alerts or face recognition to help locate a missing child. Following security incidents, hotel chains can glean valuable insights to enhance organization-wide emergency response strategy.

Cross-Location Trend Analysis

While many hotels already benefit from some form of video analytics, advanced video analytics software allows users to go beyond basic applications like license plate recognition (LPR) for parking management. Comprehensive, multi-site video analytics empowers hotel users to gather and aggregate business across all sites to promote trend understanding, drive intelligent decision-making, and develop strategy and contingency plans.

Let’s examine the importance of occupancy trend analysis. By leveraging crowd management algorithms, a hotel chain can understand that their Florida locations experience an occupancy spike in early March due to spring break, while in September their New York City sees an influx of business travelers who boost occupancy while spending very little time at the hotel. This information empowers operational decisions to support recreational staffing during spring break and extended hours for on-site restaurants where the primary demographic is business travelers.

Video intelligence and tracking capabilities can also be leveraged to understand the number of people who have entered an area, such as the pool, gym, or café so that maintenance and hospitality managers can be alerted whenever the number of people who enter that area exceeds a customized threshold. This information helps on-site managers schedule facility cleaning and staffing based on actual usage of the facility, which is more effective than relying on traditional time-based schedules. Across multiple sites, this information could reveal that cafés are consistently exceeding that threshold and therefore need to be expanded, or that gyms in warm weather locations are used less frequently and therefore required less space and equipment than originally planned.

The Power of Intelligent Decision Making

Date driven intelligence helps hotel chains make informed choices that optimize security, operations, and guest experiences across multi-site hotel organizations. Comparing data across sites allows hotels to identify organizational challenges and implement effective strategies, while real-time monitoring and centralized dashboards empower hotels to stay ahead of the curve. As the hospitality industry embraces digital transformation, multi-site video analytics will drive innovation, a competitive edge, and exceptional guest experiences.

Learn more about BriefCam Nexus, our multi-site video analytics solution, and elevate your hotel operations with our:

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2021, and has been refreshed and updated for accuracy.