Business Intelligence in Hospitality

Summary

CIO.com defines business intelligence (BI) as, "an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyze an organization's raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting." The purpose of this article is to evaluate the current status of BI in hospitality.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are currently the most popular method for BI solutions to acquire hospitality-related data, but many solutions also support extract transform and load (ETL), and flat file imports (Excel and the like), which are files with no internal hierarchy. While dynamic reports and dashboards are starting to make inroads for reporting, Excel remains the most prevalent solution used by hospitality companies to analyze their data.