What is match & merge and how it works for your hotel

As a hotel owner or hotel general manager have you ever taken a look at your guest data? Everyone talks about data these days, but in the hotel business, the amount of data collected every day is staggering. All this guest data, the insights it generates, and the shift in guest expectations are transforming the way hotels interact with their guests.

Travellers today want personalised experiences, and guest data is the key to making this happen. It's a goldmine that many hoteliers sit on these days. However, if you can leverage its power, you'll be able to anticipate guest needs even before they realise them, and create a memorable and unforgettable stay for every guest.

The only problem is that guest data can normally be dirty. Hotels receive data from multiple sources and have many channels to make a reservation. All of this causes data to be easily contaminated with duplicates, incomplete profiles, and more. 

If you want to be able to profit from your guest data, first you need to get it clean, and a great solution for this is the match & merge algorithm. 

What is match & merge?

The match & merge algorithm helps hoteliers identify duplicate guest profiles and merge them into a single, unified profile. This ensures that hotels will always have a single source of truth for each guest, eliminating inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the database.

From dirty data you go into a clean and organised repository. This feature is a key part of Bookboost CRM, which has a Customer Data Platform in its foundation. 

Why do you need the match & merge?

Imagine you want to send a birthday wish to one of your best friends, and when you open your phone, you find out you have 100 old contact details for them, and you don’t know which one is the latest one, so you can only send it to all of these numbers.

You don’t want to have 100 contact details for the same friend. And salespeople don’t want to waste time contacting the same prospect 100 times. The same thing applies to guest profiles. 

There are many factors that contribute to a cluttered guest database with duplicate profiles. 

Guests today may book hotels through different channels and this can create many duplicate profiles. Information can be entered multiple times by different staff members who may not realise a profile already exists. 

Moreover, the hospitality industry often relies on different systems that may not communicate effectively with each other. 

When some guest profiles have phone numbers and others have email addresses, this scattered and incomplete data makes it impossible to base business decisions on a clear understanding of your guests. 

Even if hoteliers try to manually merge profiles, the process can be time-consuming and prone to errors, especially with large datasets.

Therefore, here also applies the principle of less is more. 

And technology can help you solve this challenge in a timely manner so it doesn’t take away valuable time from your staff or creates human errors.

Having one profile with all the data gives you a complete picture of your guests, so you can make data-driven decisions that truly cater to your guests' needs and preferences, ultimately boosting guest satisfaction and loyalty. This is what the match & merge functionality does. 

Having scattered data across systems is one common challenge hoteliers face. Discover other common data problems and how to solve them here.

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How to use match & merge?

Use it for real-time bookings

Whenever a reservation comes in, the algorithm built within match & merge will go through your database and search for any profiles that might be a match for the incoming guest, so you won’t create any duplicates.

Use it retroactively

If you have a guest database, whether it’s from a PMS or other systems, and you want to clean it up, you can also run the algorithm and check if there’s any duplicates.

In addition, Bookboost’s match & merge algorithm has become very sophisticated so that it minimises the risk of false positives. 

What is a false positive in guest profiles?

For example, imagine a scenario where one person makes a booking using their company email address and only their last name. Coincidentally, another guest in your database might have the same last name, work for the same company, and even use the same company email address. 

The system could identify these entries as potential duplicates because the data appears identical, but in reality it’s not the same person. This is a false positive.

However, to ensure accuracy, the algorithm allows for human intervention. There’s an element of human interaction in it. When a possible miss-match is detected, hoteliers are alerted so they can double check if it’s truly the same person, and decide which data points to keep, and which to throw away before merging the profiles.

Unlock business intelligence (BI) with match & merge

If you're solely focused on real-time needs like sending confirmations and invoices, having duplicate profiles might seem unimportant. However, this data becomes a dead end when you want to gain valuable insights from your guests.

Once you have a clean guest database, you unlock the true power of business intelligence. With accurate data at your fingertips, you can make data-driven decisions that benefit your guests and your business. 

Now you are able to access the booking history of your guests, what type of room they favour, where they travel from, how they interact with your staff and more. How many times have they stayed with you? Are they loyal guests? What's their average spend per stay? Can you tailor special offers to high-value guests? Did they book directly with you or through OTAs? How many times have they booked with OTAs? 

All these valuable data allows you to refine your offerings and personalise the guest experience like never before.

Having one single guest profile cuts out the madness of data and ensures that you’re always reaching the right guests with the right message at the right time. As a result, you can build stronger guest relationships and keep driving business success.

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Explore more about guest data and how to use it to increase revenue for your property.

Have you discovered the power of Bookboost's match & merge feature? If you're interested in learning more about how it can help you achieve clean guest data and transform your guest experience, book a demo today.

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