“Clean data is smart data”: How Cendyn is enhancing hotel and customer experience
Michael Bennett, Chief Marketing Officer at Cendyn, spoke to ITB News at the show, offering key insights into how his company is helping push the hospitality industry forward, and what that means for the customer experience.
How can hotels guarantee a personalised experience while using the most innovative technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning made leaps and bounds during the pandemic. Technology companies in hospitality, including Cendyn, are taking the opportunity to explore what more we could do with the data we have.
At the moment we can take all these disparate data silos, bring them together and understand our guests, their preferences, the propensity in which they’re going to buy or do something based on what they’ve done before.
I think the revenue management science has gotten better, the CRM marketing science has gotten better and the reality is we understand our guests better and they have better experiences. The potential with the data we have and AI capabilities now is huge – we are excited to keep exploring this at Cendyn.
What is the difference between smart data and data that is less important?
With hospitality in general, there’s a lot of legacy systems. When we think about smart data, we think about bringing all those disparate data silos and databases together and then cleansing it, deduping it, enhancing it.
There’s a lot of great third party data as well to enhance that, and what you end up with is this rich clean profile data about the guests. You can use that to personalise their web experience, their rates in the booking engine, their on-property experience, so I think smart data is really about clean data and data that has been normalised and brought together.
Which international markets are exciting you and the team at Cendyn?
We’re excited about the Asia-Pacific reopening, China in particular. I think we needed China to reopen so the rest of Asia-Pacific could recover, and candidly China is a big driver of outbound travel everywhere in the world.
We see the Middle East as an emerging market in particular, along with Africa, but we’re most excited about Asia reopening and getting back to where it was. For Cendyn, that was the fastest growing market pre-pandemic so we’re ready to come back.
How would you describe what it’s like being back at ITB?
It feels surreal, it feels like I was just here. It’s been a long time but we’re excited about this. It’s always been a great show for Cendyn and as we continue to globalise our business, we’re happy to be back. It sounds like it’s going to be a busy week and we couldn’t be more excited to be here.
