Expand your Hospitality Business with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
The skills gained in the hospitality industry will always provide a solid foundation that can take you anywhere. One skill the industry struggles to capitalize on, however, is the ability to use its data to its advantage. Companies are losing opportunities through a failure to properly analyze trends from hotel bookings or assess the company’s return on investment for restaurant locations, for example. Bold BI’s fully customizable dashboards put information companies depend on at their fingerprints, making it easy to track performance indicators in real-time. In this blog, I am going to give an overview of embedded analytics and how Bold BI can help enhance the hospitality industry.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is integrating analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI lets you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It also enables you to reduce dependency on IT teams and delivers all the insight you need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of embedded analytics in the hospitality industry
The hospitality industry has a large amount of data needing to be tracked daily, which can be highly challenging. The hospitality industry can embrace embedded analytics to help save on resources and time in doing this. It also helps speed up analysis, allowing more time for managers and other decision-makers to plan their data-driven improvements. With embedded analytics, you can monitor all your key metrics in real-time and in one place. Let’s see the key areas in which embedded analytics helps improve your hospitality business:
- Expanding revenue sources.
- Obtaining high occupancy.
- Creating effective workflow management.
- Improving hotels’ effectiveness and performance.
Expanded revenue sources
Embedded analytics help a hospitality team review booking processes. For example, if an overbooking occurs, analytics can tell you, based on past data, the likelihood of cancellations and no shows on the overbooked dates. This helps hotel managers determine the necessity and timing of cancelling on the extra guests and turning down potential bookings in general. Thus, possible losses can be averted. By including your analytical results to a booking engine, guests can determine when to come or book according to their preferences. For example, some guests prefer a busy month, and other guests prefer a quiet month. You can provide this information in the booking engine from analysis of previous years. This will provide more satisfied customers, and in turn, will help a business increase its revenue.
Obtaining high occupancy
The occupancy rate of a hotel determines the revenue and success in a long run. Embedded analytics help the hospitality industry become more successful by highlighting recurring issues guests have in the maintenance of rooms, spaciousness of rooms, cleanliness, or overall comfort. Having attention brought so quickly to these issues lets hotel owners make swift improvements. The owner thereby increases the satisfaction of guests, increasing their recommendation of and returns to the hotel, which increases the occupancy of their hotel.
Effective workflow management
Embedded analytics helps managers track a company’s workflow using key metrics such as booking sources, RGI based on regions, and more. Monitoring these metrics lets the company know the booking percentages through phone, online, direct referral, and others. Managers can identify regions generating low revenue and regions generating more revenue. So, the company will know where to direct resources to maintain the positive revenue streams and address the problems resulting in low revenue. An increase in company revenue will lead to company development and expansion.
Improve hotels effectiveness and performance
Let’s consider an example where you have multiple hotels or motels around the world whose revenue you want to monitor. By using embedded analytics, you can quickly view the locations that generate the most revenue, their average daily rate, revenue per available room, occupancy, and average rate index. Once you have this information, you can figure out a way to market your underperforming hotels to generate more business. Using customer feedback and reviews, managers can freely learn customer preferences and emulate what has worked well to give guests the most pleasant stay. It will help them increase rebooking rates and enables them to work on issues that earn their business less revenue.
How to embed analytics tools into hospitality apps
Let’s see how analytics can be embedded into the web applications of hospitality companies. Bold BI can embed your dashboards in more than 10 web platforms, including ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. In the rest of this blog, I am going to explain how to embed dashboards into your Angular applications. Consider a scenario in which your company has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Download and install the Bold BI server in your local machine and create a dashboard. You can find the installation and deployment steps here.
Step 1: Create an Angular application.
To successfully embed a dashboard in your application, you first need to create an Angular application. Create a new Angular project in Visual Studio Code and add the necessary files to the project, as shown in the following image.
For more guidance, refer to the sample code in the Bold BI documentation.
In this demonstration, the Angular application acts as a client, and an ASP.NET Core application acts as a server. You need to add several properties in the app.component.ts file, as shown in the following table and screenshot.
Properties : Property Value DescriptionsRootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL.
Example: http://localhost:58094/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI Enterprise, it should follow the format `site/site1`.
For Bold BI Cloud, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud, you should use `cloud`. If using Bold BI Enterprise, you should use `enterprise`.apiHost : An ASP.NET Core application would be run on http://localhost:5000/, which needs to be set as `apiHost`.
After adding these properties, we need to create the Bold BI instance.
Step 2: Create a Bold BI instance.
After the Angular web application is created, you need to create a Bold BI instance to communicate between the server side (any web application) and the client side (Angular application), which allows us to embed a Bold BI dashboard in the Angular application.
Step 3: Create an authorization server to authenticate the Bold BI server.
Every application that embeds a Bold BI dashboard or widget must be authorized with the Bold BI server. This authentication step requires sending confidential information to the Bold BI server, such as users’ email addresses, group data, and embed signatures. So, in your server application, implement this authentication flow and provide the URL for connecting to your server in the Bold BI Embedded instance.
Step 4: Run the Angular application to view the embedded dashboard.
In the Angular application, update the authorization URL and dashboard URL that were defined in the ASP.NET Core application. Finally, you can that see the dashboard created in the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
To learn more about embedding dashboards into your Angular applications, refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code used in the previous steps from our documentation.
Bold BI hospitality industry dashboard examples
Hotel Revenue Dashboard
By embedding the Hotel Revenue Dashboard, you can visualize the various KPIs of hotels helpful to the industry. The metrics include revenue, revenue ADR, occupancy and ARI, RGI based on region, etc.
Key metrics and KPIs
Revenue and occupancy by category: Displays the revenue and occupancy rate based on category.
Booking sources: Displays the percentages of bookings by source, such as phone, online, direct, referral, and others.
RGI based on region: Displays revenue generated index based on region.
Revenue per available room (RevPAR) and average daily rate (ADR): Displays the revenue per available room and average daily rate for the current year.
Occupancy and average rate index: Shows the hotel’s occupancy and the average rate of the rooms over a period of time.
To learn more about the metrics and KPIs used in this dashboard example, refer to the Hotel Revenue Dashboard demo.
Conclusion
Bold BI Embedded helps you to integrate dashboards in your applications written in React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, WinForms, Node.js, Vue with Go, Vue with Core, and more seamlessly. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about integrating dashboards in your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it will help the hospitality domain to be more successful. You can create a dashboard as you like with Bold BI’s 35 widgets and 130 data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and create more interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on January 11, 2022.
