9 Hotel Business Intelligence Tools to Maximize Profit in 2024

Running a hotel involves a constant flow of decisions—managing room rates, tracking occupancy, improving guest experiences, and ensuring smooth operations. With so many moving parts, having the right data at your fingertips is crucial for success. This is where Hotel Business Intelligence (BI) tools come into play.

In this blog, we’ll explore the 10 Best Hotel Business Intelligence Tools that deliver actionable insights to optimize your hotel’s performance. From boosting revenue with dynamic pricing strategies to enhancing operational efficiency through real-time data, these tools offer comprehensive solutions for better decision-making.

We’ll break down key features, benefits, and use cases to help you gain clarity you need to choose the right platform to stay competitive and drive growth in the hotel industry.

Let’s start with understanding what it is and how it works.

What is Hotel Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence in hotels is a system that extracts data from various sources, transforms it, arranges it in a centralized repository, and finally presents it into a meaningful format to further utilize it in various business functions. 

These BI tools offers fast and widespread access to accurate information and insights.

By providing unique features and reports, these tools also keep track of both historical and future activity and also help in understanding where opportunities exist within their business to increase profits.   

10 Best Business Intelligence Tools for Hotel Industry

Major hotel brands are using Hotel Business Intelligence (BI) tools to gain a competitive edge. These tools provide accurate performance data, helping hotel owners make informed decisions that drive growth and boost profits.

With seamless interconnections to other systems like property management and revenue management software, BI platforms offer valuable insights that simplify operations. Below, we’ve listed the top 10 BI tools designed to enhance and streamline hotel business processes.

1. Makcorps Hotel Price API

Makcorps Hotel API enables hotel business owners to get real-time hotel price comparison data from 200+ online travel agencies globally. With this data hotel businesses can conduct an effective competitive price analysis and an advantage to leverage your hotel price positioning strategy.

Pros – 

• Easy access to price updates of the industry for tracking hotel prices effectively.
• Secure competitive advantage and sharp pricing by analyzing competitor’s strategies.
• Also Provides Historical Hotel Pricing Data.

Cons – 

Doesn’t allow other facilities such as booking hotels.

2. LightHouse

Lighthouse, formerly known as OTA Insight, is a user-friendly hotel business intelligence software that delivers clear, actionable data through its extensive feature set.

One of the most essential USPs of this tool is that it exports all the data from a PMS (property management system) automatically with all the figures and KPIs displayed in a user-friendly way.

It helps its customers to easily visualize and leverage the data directly.

Pros – 

• Has an automated approach to data collection and integration.
• It offers both multi-property management and multi-user optimizations.
• Provides the tiniest details of the market data insights.

Cons – 

• Doesn’t allow its user to choose the data to display for the segmentation filter.
• Has rigid report customization.

3. Scoreboard by Duetto

Scoreboard by Duetto stands out from other business intelligence tools for hotels in providing its customer with cutting-edge analytics and AI.

It offers customized reports based on precise day-level conjectures on an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard. 

It is a practical and advanced hotel software that is time-tested and makes a real difference in hotel performance data reports.

Pros – 

• It offers automated data collection integration.
• Provides multi-property management.

Cons – 

It is limited to group segment reporting.

4. Hotel IQ

For the revenue managers that daily deal with the hassle of manually taking care of tedious spreadsheets, it’s time to switch to intelligent, visual reports and dashboards.

Hotel IQ is an effective hotel business intelligence for hotel analytics and data management which can save you efficient time in physically creating reports. 

It utilizes information from the PMS, your property, and other interior and external sources to provide reliable data and predictive forecasts.

Pros –

• It helps you pace up your revenue.
• Offers corporate and travel agency account tracking.

Cons-

• Has limited report customization and lacks some KPIs.

5. Hotellistat

Hotellistat is an all-in-one hospitality business analytics tool that is highly effective for digital marketing positioning, marketing, and competitor analysis for your hotel.

It offers an innovative revenue market and business intelligence strategy that saves you time and money.

Pros – 

• It is a cost-effective rate-shopping tool.
• Has built-in social media management.

Cons – 

• Do not automatically update rates.
• Focuses more on marketing rather than overall business intelligence.

6. D-Edge

D-Edge is useful business intelligence in the hospitality industry that does more than collect and analyze data.

It provides a deeper understanding of the distribution channels, their performance, and their behaviors to make decisions effectively.

Strategically planning can effectively increase your revenue generation.

Pros –

• It is a user-friendly application and offers automated data gathering.

Cons – 

• Its reporting is limited to distribution.

7. IdeaS RevPlan

IdeaS RevPlan is an impressive business intelligence tool that focuses on total revenue forecasting and budgeting. 

By offering the most accurate room and FNB ( Food & Beverage ) forecasting, it drives greater profitability.

Pros – 

• It helps you analyze both market and internal data.
• Has automated decision-making with AI and machine learning.

Cons – 

• It offers limited historical data lookback.
• Has a lack of analytics dashboard.

8. M3 Insight Software

M3 offers a simple-to-use administrative center, accounting innovation, and dashboards that display various KPIs across all your hotel locations.

Pros –

Offers forecasting and budgeting, food and beverage reporting, analysis, and forecasting.

Cons – 

It has limited pre-made reports. Also, it lacks corporate and travel agency account tracking.

9. ProfitSage by ProfitSword

ProfitSword is an effective price intelligence for hotels that have created deep connections with more than 100+ hotel owners.

It is a reliable data collection and analysis tool with curated features for the hospitality industry.

Its unique intelligence is perfect for budgeting and forecasting which helps hotel managers to generate high profits.

Pros – 

• Provides business and marketing plans, accurate data analysis, and forecasting.

Cons –

• Limited reporting tools, and slower loading time.

Benefits of Using Business Intelligence Software for Your Hotel

Most hotel owners keep on wondering how business intelligence can be helpful in the hospitality industry and to be more specific, how it will be beneficial for their individual businesses.

Thus, we have listed all the benefits of using business intelligence software for your hotel that will help you shape your mind.

Uses Of Business Intelligence Solution For Your Hotel 

Apart from the multiple benefits that you get while using business intelligence tools for hotels, they also possess numerous uses which can make your business operations much easier and more efficient.

Here are different uses of business intelligence software in the hotel industry.

 1. Customer Segmentation

You can use business intelligence solutions for your hotel to segment your customers on the basis of demography, geography, behavior, income, and much more.

Through the automated approach of these smart solutions, you can directly use the data two effectively segment and target your preferred customer base.

There are many tools that already provide you with the option of segregating the data that comes from booking made.

Also, through effective customer segmentation, you can personalize your approach to enhance the overall customer experience.

2. Occupancy Analysis

BI software for hotels effectively tracks historical and current data, providing insights into occupancy rates which is also a key metric in hotel yield management. This data can help you conduct effective reservation analysis and optimize pricing.

You can compare your annual data to analyze what impacts your occupancy rate and accordingly optimize your hotel’s occupancy rate and other business functions to enhance profits.

By comparing and considering multiple factors such as seasonal changes, competitors’ markets, your own pricing strategy, and many others, these tools can help you determine actual factors.

3. Revenue Management And Advanced Pricing Strategies

Intelligence tools for the hotel industry provide multiple hotel revenue management reports after analyzing the data accumulated over time and help you create optimum hotel revenue management pricing strategies.

After considering hundreds of factors and targeted revenue, it helps you in demand forecasting based on which you can come up with a suitable pricing strategy to maximize revenue generation.

4. Distribution Channel Analysis

Data Analytics in the hospitality industry is an important task that requires high accuracy and must consider multiple distribution channels.

A single hotel may have hundreds of partner distributors that sell the hotel’s inventory indirectly.

It is important to take into account the distribution cost of each channel so that they can be managed accordingly.

Business tools in the hospitality industry can provide insights into the revenue generated by each channel while conducting a comparative analysis between them.

It makes the process much easier for hoteliers to understand which partnered distributors bring value to your business.

5. Competitor Overview

Another effective use of business intelligence tools in the hotel industry is that they provide business owners with relative market data to keep an eye on the competitors.

They present a competitive advantage for your business by providing you with a comparative competitor overview using which you can optimize your marketing and pricing strategies. 

What Are the Most Important Features You Should Look for In Hotel Business Intelligence Solutions?

While choosing a suitable hotel business intelligence solution for your business, you must keep a note of a few features that can prove to be game changers in the industry.

Some of the most important features you should look for are – 

1)  User-friendly – The application you are choosing must have ease of access without any lengthy complications to keep them user-friendly.

2) Data insights – some business intelligence tools offer a deep insight into the data to help you understand what’s impacting your business the most. This type of feature is truly the one that can flip the table. 

3) Data management – One of the most important features you should look for in a hotel business intelligence solution is its ability to manage and clean data to maintain the report quality and accuracy. 

4) Effective forecasting and budgeting support – Tools that can help you forecast and budget your business operations at the base level are quite important. They allow you to measure your performance on an ongoing basis while focusing on achieving your goals.

What Is the Typical Pricing of Hotel Business Intelligence Tools?

The pricing of any hotel business intelligence tool mainly depends upon the type and depth of data that your business requires.

Usually, it includes an initial setup fee along with a monthly subscription cost. Again, your monthly subscription rate depends on your hotel size and the different features provided by the software. 

Hospitality software companies offer trial-based free plans through which you can understand how the tool works and whether it would align with your overall business strategy.

Hotels that are taking their first step into the business intelligence world can benefit through such trial plans in selecting suitable software for themselves. 

There are most basic BI solutions and reporting that work without productive or self-service features.

Usually, they cost much less and can start as low as $2 per month. 

For people operating a multi-property chain and requiring a highly intensive program that could offer a full range of productive and self-service features along with additional integrations; you must choose a solution that can offer wide features.

Their cost could vary as per the features provided by different software owners.

How Long Does It Usually Take To Integrate Hotel Business Tools?

Hotel business tools are smart and don’t take more than one to two weeks for a single property.

Once you complete your simple and quick setup process, you can move ahead with live and on-demand user training. 

It will help you to understand how the software works and what different features you can utilize.

After completing the training, you are ready to use your software and take your business to new heights.

Challenges of Integration of Business Intelligence in the Hotel Industry

Keeping the benefits aside that business intelligence brings to the hotel industry, they also face multiple challenges that one must address before using them.

Different challenges of integration of business intelligence in the hotel industry are –

Integration issues

Intelligence offers are technical components that bring in multiple software tools which need to be integrated into your internal infrastructure.

This integration exposes your Internal data to the software keeping it at risk. 

The connection between systems will allow the BI to automatically extract required data from its source so as to create reports.

At times this integration process is not as smooth as it should be because of several difficulties in terms of accessibility and maintenance.

This is a major challenge among hotel industry leaders that requires an immediate solution in order to use the tool effectively. 

Selecting Suitable Data

Another major challenge lies with the selection of suitable data.

Data analytics in the hospitality industry is something that is very much crucial in the hotel industry.

As a majority of business operations work on the basis of a detailed analysis of multiple data accumulated through different sources.

To integrate your business intelligence solution, you need to determine which data will be taken for analysis along with its purpose.

For business owners operating with multiple properties, a difference in infrastructure and type of data could create severe problems.

The choice of data for such businesses will depend on the analytical purposes. Such complex tasks are often handled rather than data science to avoid any blunder.

if you’ve made it this far, you’ve learned almost everything you need to know about hotel business intelligence software. However, you might still have a few lingering questions about it. Don’t worry though, we’ve anticipated what those questions might be and we’ve got the answers waiting for you just below.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Final Thoughts:

The usage of such smart technology has reduced a lot of manual labor in terms of collecting information.

In a highly competitive world, such Business intelligence Tools for hotels play an important role and aid hotel owners in optimizing their performance.

More and more businesses are shifting their business performances to a data-driven technology to achieve competitive advantage.

So, what are you waiting for? Start using Business Intelligence Tools to Elevate your hotel profitablitity.