Client
Choice Hotels
Market
Commercial
Industry
Hospitality
Offerings
AI and Analytics
With more than 5,000 franchised properties in the United States alone, managing the property lifecycle is critical to Choice Hotels’ continued success. But disparate data sources divided across multiple business units created manual effort and made it difficult to get consistent reporting to drive decision-making. Excella led the data consolidation and dashboard development to create a unified picture of every domestic property.
Integrating Data to Support Multiple Teams
The Lifecycle project set an ambitious goal for a set of dashboards that could support the differing needs of the Franchise Development, Franchise Services, Legal, Global Sales, Finance, and Brand Standards and Compliance departments. Enabling analysis across multiple departments required incorporating multiple data sources, ranging from corporate contract and property management systems to third-party data. The data sources were connected for the first time in the HP Vertica platform.
Making Data Accessible
Excella then used Tableau to build interactive, webbased data visualizations that could be viewed on desktop, tablet, and mobile phone without any additional client software. Because the dashboards were web-based, they were easily integrated into Choice Hotel’s SalesForce application, which allowed the dashboards to be rapidly deployed to over 150 regular users. In a single location, employees can now access key information on a hotel, including property attributes, RevPAR/ADR/Occupancy, guest satisfaction scores, brand compliance ratings, financial performance, and contract status. Additional views are also available specifically for franchise development, contract maintenance, portfolio management, and market analysis. For example, in the event view, the Choice sales team can quickly assess key events happening in their portfolio (properties opening, terminating, etc.) and drill down for more detail to take immediate action.
Combining Usability and Performance
Too often, companies throw everything but the kitchen sink into their visualizations, and are left with overstuffed dashboards that get ignored. Excella made usability a top priority, and created visualizations that contained a great deal of information but were easy to scan and use every day.
Excella also recommended best practices for data automation, testing, report design, visualization, and performance optimization that Choice could apply to both new and existing dashboards. As a result, Choice was able to improve dashboard performance by 50%.
Improving Operational Focus
By putting data on 5,000 properties at its employees’ fingertips, Choice Hotels has achieved a new level of efficiency. Instead of looking up each property in multiple systems, employees can immediately access all the data they need in a single location. And instead of working straight through property lists – which invests valuable time on properties that are doing well but underserves properties that need attention – the portfolio and market views allow Choice to prioritize its property services and market investments. Today, the massive task of overseeing thousands of properties is a bit more manageable.