The Power of Data Extraction in the Travel and Hospitality Industry
Airbnb, the largest hospitality website has more 4+ million Airbnb hosts worldwide and 6+ million active listings on the platform. Impressive, isn’t it? How did Airbnb manage to achieve it? Well, it was a unique idea. However, the site also relies heavily on data. Airbnb, uses data to know its customer preferences, host preferences, calculate the Net promoter score etc.
Similar is the case with booking.com, a site that wouldn’t work without data backing it up. The point we are trying to make here that data is becoming the lifeblood of the tourism and the hospitality industry. Data does not only power strategic decisions, it also enable a competitive advantage as well. However, it all comes down to how data is leveraged.
The problem with modern data today is its volume, variety and velocity. It comes from many diverse sources and at an unprecedented rate, which is why data extraction software have become an absolute necessity.
Understanding Data Extraction in Tourism
In the tourism industry, data can come from travel websites, social media platforms, customer reviews, booking data, and competitor sites. It mostly includes information about booking trends, competitor data, customer preferences, geographical insights, and even weather and event data. Now as far as structured data is concerned, one that is stored in maybe a relational database, that is easy to extract. However, when it comes to unstructured data from social media, for example, it could be a hassle.
A data extraction software makes the process simple by extracting data from various sources within minutes. These software have built-in connectors, which make it easier to connect to most of the data sources. Then, you can just extract data without writing any code. For example, if you have a PDF, these software will easily convert it into excel data for you to analyze. In fact, today most software are equipped with AI capabilities that use advanced algorithms to extract information from images, and even videos.
Type of Data Extraction Tools
Before we move on to the specifics of the benefits of employing this software, let us explain you the types of data extraction software available in the market:
Web Scraping Tools: These tools automatically extract data from websites, something extensively used in the tourism industry. It allows businesses to gather real-time information about hotel prices, reviews, and availability, and helps them stay competitive. For example, booking.com may employ this tool to monitor competitors' pricing and availability and adjust their offers in real time to attract more customers.
Data Extraction Platforms: These are comprehensive platforms that offer a range of data extraction and transformation capabilities. They often include features for data cleaning, and data integration as well. Most data extraction platforms are now code-free and are now equipped with advanced functionalities such as OCR (Optical character recognition) and AI that can extract data with any manual effort. While there are specialized pdf scrapersv as well, most data extraction platforms also come with pdf data extraction capabilities.
Email Scraping Tools: Email scraping software is designed to extract email addresses and other information from email content, web pages, and text documents. It's often used for marketing and lead generation.
What Information Can Data Extraction Software Retrieve?
- Customer Reviews and Sentiments
Customer review analytics is an important part of the tourism industry and data extraction tools can easily scrape customer reviews and sentiments from platforms like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and social media. Using these reviews, you can identify your critical and praise-worthy aspects. For example, you might find out that customers get upset because of long wait time for housekeeping. You can identify it and rectify it immediately.
- Pricing and Availability
The hospitality industry relies heavily on dynamic pricing to maximize its revenue. The strategy allows hotels to adjust their rates according to the market and capture more occupancy. With the help of data extraction tools, sites like booking.com can easily analyze pricing trends and offer competitive rates to customers.
- Trend Analysis
A very interesting thing that a data extraction tool can the hospitality sector with is trend analysis. So, it not only makes it easier to extract data from internal business sources but also external sources such as government sites etc. For example, post-COVID-19, Airbnb analyzed travel trends to identify the growing popularity of remote work and offered accommodations tailored to this trend, such as longer-term rentals.
Conclusion
The importance of data extraction or data management tools cannot be understated. However, it is important to understand that these are just tools, what matters is how effectively these tools are utilized and how data is leveraged for decision making. The pandemic showed how uncertain circumstances can be and the tourism industry learnt its lesson. Companies like Airbnb, which knew how to work with managed to stay afloat in adverse circumstances as well. So, in the end it all comes down to having a data-centric culture.
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