Acts as the foundation for a data warehouse to help drive
Customer Relationship Management programs
IBM announced today that it has developed a Customer Information System (CIS) Data Model for the hospitality industry. The Data Model, which acts as a repository for guest-related information, is designed to help hotels drive their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) marketing initiatives by serving as the foundation of the hotel’s data warehouse.
The Data Model, which is customizable to a company’s specific needs, captures and manages guests’ complete profile and transaction histories on a worldwide basis. This includes data from disparate sources such as reservations, folios, point-of-sale transactions, preferences, complaints, marketing promotion responses and loyalty program transactions, as well as general demographics and lifestyle information.
Additionally the Data Model provides an infrastructure to manipulate the guest information through data mining to help hotels determine the value of a customer.  This information can help a hotel spot trends and gain new insights into customer behavior, enabling it to develop new marketing strategies, and drive the development of new products and services which meet specific customer needs.
“The CIS Hospitality Data Model is designed to help hotel companies build a solid customer data warehouse to extract, clean and store customer information—across all properties,” said Robert L. Long, business information services segment executive, IBM Travel & Transportation Industry.
“In the highly competitive hospitality industry, this will enable hotel companies to gain greater insight into their guests’ preferences and travel patterns, allowing them to understand
their guests better and helping them to deliver personalized service, tailored products and programs -  in short, giving their guests what they want—which is the ultimate goal of customer service,” Long added.
The CIS Hospitality Data Model includes a campaign management module that gives hotels the tools to run, manage and analyze marketing campaigns.  It permits the flexibility of multiple campaign participants, promotional offers, target lists, campaign response types, distribution channels and media.  Using the customer segments identified from data mining efforts, hotels can develop personalized offers to their guests, whose responses are then tracked and analyzed via the Data Model, to give hotels greater insight into what makes a successful promotion.
IBM’s Travel and Transportation Industry group and its Business Partners provide products, services and integrated solutions to all areas of the travel-related services industry, including hotels, gaming, cruise lines, travel agents and tour operators.  More information can be found at www.ibm.com/solutions/travel.
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