Hotel Cateys 2024: Best Use of Innovative Technology Award – The Athenaeum Hotel & Residences

The words “data integration project” are enough to make the most hardened IT expert shudder. And it’s a term that is cropping up more and more as businesses recognise that operating with data from seemingly endless sources can be a nightmare – especially if a hotel has been operating for many years.

This year’s winner says that before it embarked on its impressive data integration project the hotel was “entangled in a soup of legacy systems locked in by solution providers that almost held us hostage with the fear of losing our data”.

From duplicate or incomplete guest profiles to an impossibility to achieve a measurable view of the guest journey, its limited metrics were holding the business back. Clearly something had to be done.

The Athenaeum Hotel & Residences responded by creating a customer data platform (CDP) called ‘Datanaeum’, which it now considers the hotel’s “digital brain”. It collates all of the property’s disconnected data sources into a single view of the guest, putting an emphasis on loyalty by using artificial intelligence and data-driven insights.

Prior to Datanaeum, the hotel’s revenue manager was the gatekeeper of the quantitative data, while the longstanding doorman, Jim, was the one with the much-prized qualitative data, especially information on loyal guests and local recommendations. Ahead of the project the hotel knew it wanted to ensure Jim’s personal approach and word-of-mouth recommendations would not be lost. And it was the starting point to ensure the project kept a human approach at all times – and a way to focus on better serving loyal guests.

After cleaning and enriching eight years’ worth of raw data and creating a new CDP to drill down for actionable insight, the hotel is now reaping the rewards – thanks to going from monthly manual reporting of historical data to on-demand and daily reporting and AI-powered forecasting.

Judges described it as “quite remarkable” and an example where technology can successfully marry with the human touch of hospitality. The new CDP allows the hotel to remove the guesswork from marketing and offer guests personalised messages, while Datanaeum’s bespoke loyalty dashboards means the team can extract segmented lists with booking-profile attributes that can be directly fed into email marketing campaigns, followed up with a personal phone call. This personalised data has helped the hotel improve its overall satisfaction score by 0.7% to 87.8%, while improved insights help it respond to market changes and improve its revenue generating index performance by 4.2%. Reduced costs and return on advertising spend can also be put down to the new CDP.

Judges agreed that the Athenaeum was a trailblazer, with Datanaeum helping the team deliver a more personal service the moment its guest walks through the door.

What the judges said

“Fantastic to see a hotel marry a large data-driven project with a human touch. A hotel like that demands a personal approach, and reading how a big overhaul of data came together with Jim the doorman is fantastic.”

Joe Strudwick