SnapShot GmbH, a Berlin-based Big Data startup focused on the hospitality industry, received a big boost this week with €25 million in series B funding from Beijing Shiji Information Technology Co., (Shiji Networks) to help scale out its suite of data analytics tools aimed at hoteliers.

There aren’t many bigger buzzwords in tech than “Big Data” at the moment, and with good reason too. Wikibon predicts that the Big Data market will be worth in excess of $61 billion by 2020, and we’ve all heard about the success stories from companies like Netflix Inc., Amazon.com, Inc and IBM, just to name just a few. As profitable as these companies can be slicing and dicing customer data though, there’s no industry better suited to leverage data than hotels. As third parties like online travel agencies (OTAs) siphon off more of every hotel’s bookings, data management is becoming an antidote for a balanced sales funnel.

Laying off the marketing speak for a moment, we must remember that Big Data technologies are still relatively nascent. Outside of a few tech giants and innovative marketing, retail and finance firms, it’s clear that few industries have tapped into it, and even those who have are reticent to fully utilize the potential. Indeed, many companies are still stuck in a siloed rut, with little idea of how to even begin tapping into their data. Even for those companies “all in” for integrating this vast resource, they find very few toolmakers to help them cope.

Hospitality’s data disaster

Focusing on this hospitality sector, the news Shiji Networks has just infused SnapShot with capital is something of a red flag. For those unfamiliar, Shiji was founded by the man Forbes recently called “Alibaba’s secret weapon”, Li Zhonghchu. This Chinese businessman has almost single handedly transformed China’s hotel industry from an IT perspective in the last 17 years.

Martin Soler, Chief Marketing Officer, SnapShot

Now SnapShot, the first tech startup to focus on building a platform to structure and analyze hotel information, seems to be a catalyst for a Shiji IT expansion into Europe. Martin Soler, Chief Marketing Officer at SnapShot (pictured left), explained to SiliconANGLE how the travel industry epitomizes the potential uses of data, and the problems that arise in doing so. In his own words, “hotel data is a disaster”, with very few hotels outside of the big international chains that have an inkling how to access their data, let alone try to extract valuable business insights from it.

The biggest problem for hotels is their data is often siloed in containers beyond their control, locked away in property management systems or in customer relationship management (CRM) systems, Soler explained. This data is largely inaccesible to the average hotelier, and kept entirely separate from other, Web-based data like social media, hotel reviews and so on.

“Working as a hotel general manager, then a marketing exectutive, I’ve experienced first hand the hotel data problem,” Soler said. “It’s not that we as hotels don’t have data, rather it’s that we have data in so many different places.”

“General managers simply don’t have time to dig into the data to try and spot trends, and so forth. When I joined SnapShot I began to see a solution to that problem, structuring the data, speeding up the decision process, even providing a prediction matrix, if you will.”

Solving “what digital customers do”

That “solution” is to develop a suite of data analytics services that brings together items like distribution, finance, marketing and revenue management. According to Soler, that is what SnapShot is building, what it calls a “demand management” platform focused on driving optimal profit and performance by helping hotels to effectively budget, strategize and forecast demand. This all seems like a tall order, and it is according to the veteran marketing guru.

SnapShot Analytics right now is a data aggregation platform provides a grid-like interface that delivers basic business intelligence to hotel operators. It’s a powerful tool, but the company itself admits the complexity involved will deter a lot of hoteliers from using it in this form. What’s needed, it would seem, is a tool with the same powerful back end, but a slimline and simplified operational dashboard (my words).

To fulfil its potential, SnapShot needs to ensure its platform can tap into the wealth of booking data and reviews hotels generate, and this is where its new benefactor Shiji Networks comes into play. Although still relatively unknown in the West, Shiji is actually something of a powerhouse in China’s IT industry. It provides IP solutions to more than 6,000 hotels as customers, recently teamed up with Alibaba’s Alitrip Travel site, and will now integrate SnapShot’s own services into its wider offerings.

Shiji’s partnerships with Alibaba and SnapShot are important because they underscore how the company is trying to squeeze out the human element as it builds an all-encompassing platform for the hospitality business.

Right here is where the symbiosis of technology demand arises. A huge IT and software entity focused on an innovative solution provider, both targeting what data and business gurus have preached the last five years. To help us focus on what’s happening in this deal better, Brian Solis, principal at Altimeter Group and famed digital analyst and anthropologist, speaker and author, reiterated something to us from one of his last speaking engagements. The cunundrum for B2C and B2B marketing for hotels is perfectly attuned to Solis’ whole “change” in business speak:

“One of the greatest catalysts for change is that of customer behavior, and the fact their values are so radically different from current norms and models. Simply solving for “what digital customers would do”, reveals your business’ priorities and next steps.”

And that’s exactly what SnapShot is aiming to do, by democratizing data in the hospitality industry and ensuring its availability for everyone, not just the big name hotels. There’s hotel data, and then there’s hotel data driven by customer behaviors, geography, season, and a million other facets. In the end, the customer is an irrefutable variable in the success equation. SnapShot’s marketing chief encapsulates my conclusion best.

“Imagine if one could analyze that every weekend when there is good weather we have ten points more occupancy, and that next weekend is forecast to have great weather,” SnapShot’s Soler explained. “It sounds stupid, but it’s really that basic. Simple things like that aren’t being tracked, and hotels need help with that.”

When asked about the coming tools mentioned in SnapShot Travel’s press, Soler was reluctant to talk specifics. Nonetheless we can surmise the company’s so-called “Grid” platform offers massive utility for hoteliers with expert analytics and revenue people in teams. But such grid-like behemoths daunt even the most intelligent SMEs and private entities now. What the SnapShot- Shiji-Alibaba triad suggests (and this is only a suggestion) is a one-size-fits-all mega solution. Perhaps this is too optimistic, but given the need it’s only logic. Whether SnapShot can make the toolbox or not, we’ll have to wait and see.

Image credits: SnapShot GmbH;