A brand-new format for the 2024 CDO Travel & Hospitality Exchange, Focus Rooms aim to offer a more niche, personalised angle to your challenges. Before the Exchange, you can opt to submit a problem you are currently facing that you do not see on the agenda – fellow peers will then be invited to gather around and discuss off-the-cuff solutions, sharing expertise and fresh ideas that have the potential to benefit all.

Standardisation becomes all the more difficult when considering most travel and hospitality companies have multiple business divisions operating as one enterprise: from caravan parks operating as real estate and ferries acting as tour operators, all the way through to hotels and their restaurant downstairs, different datasets co-exist independently from each other, and often cannot be merged to gain insight over the long-term. Join this continuation of the fireside chat to discuss as a group how companies with multiple offerings for customers can begin to harmonise their data across different systems and business divisions in order to improve decision-making going forward.

- Discover key ways to develop standardised data models, such as data profiling, in order to create a centralised approach across all business divisions

- Explore the possibility of data integration tools and platforms and master data management, how they might benefit your teams, and the key ways to implement them into your business model

- Dive into the importance of cross-divisional collaboration and sharing protocols in order to define common KPIs and align with business objectives across divisions

Dee Samra

Global Director of Data & AI Governance
Booking.com

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In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, leveraging data and GenAI tools has become a critical factor for companies in the travel and hospitality industry looking to secure a competitive edge. Maximizing business profitability goes beyond resource optimization—it extends to creating an exceptional customer experience, beginning from the first point of contact with a brand.

During this session, we will explore how AI can accelerate the holiday purchasing process, making it more seamless and personalized, while also harnessing the power of customer feedback across multiple platforms and channels.

Key Learnings:

•   Leveraging GenAI for Enhanced Holiday Sales: Explore how GenAI can streamline the holiday purchase process by introducing a conversational search experience. This demo will showcase how holidaymakers can express their needs and expectations in natural language, mimicking a conversation with a travel agent, to find their ideal vacation faster and with greater ease.

•   Comprehensive Analysis of Guest Reviews: Understand how AI-driven solutions can analyze hotel guest reviews across various channels, including social media, distribution partners, and intermediary platforms. Large Language Models (LLMs) can summarize, categorize feedback, and assess sentiment to provide valuable insights. Discover how these insights can be visualized through intuitive dashboards, enabling operations and business managers to monitor guest experiences and make informed decisions in real-time.

Krzysztof Kąkol

Chief of Data Engineering and Solutions Architect
Xebia

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In the travel and hospitality industry, sharing insights is not just beneficial—it’s essential. From commercial and technical maintenance to guest services, the seamless exchange of information within departments and across companies drives operational efficiency and enhances customer experiences.

As we continue to navigate a global landscape where events like air traffic disruptions, meteorological phenomena, and local strikes have significant impacts, it will be crucial to leverage shared insights. This collaboration allows companies to focus on differentiating their services and prioritizing guest care, rather than merely managing crises.

However, effective sharing of insights will require vigilance and optimization to ensure that all involved parties benefit while safeguarding sensitive information. The upcoming discussion will focus on key aspects to make insights collaboration both effective and secure:

1. Identifying Meaningful Internal Events: Establishing protocols to identify and share critical information across departments, ensuring that all relevant teams are aligned and informed
2. Enhancing Cross-Company Customer Journeys: Sharing insights enables better understanding of customer preferences and behaviors, allowing companies to personalize experiences at scale. By coordinating services across companies, we can ensure seamless transitions and proactive problem resolution, leading to a more satisfying customer journey. Consistent insights sharing also supports unified communication, ensuring that all customer-facing teams are equipped with the latest information
3. Prioritizing Data Privacy and Security: Understanding data privacy requirements and establishing clear agreements and protocols to ensure compliance and protect sensitive information when sharing insights with other companies
4. Implementing a Data Governance Framework: Developing a robust data governance framework to define data ownership, ensure transparency, and build trust throughout the insight-sharing process
5. Assessing Interoperability and Integration: Evaluating your company’s systems for interoperability and integration capabilities. Learning how to leverage data connections and middleware solutions to facilitate exchange and minimize technical barriers
6. Harnessing Generative AI for Enhanced Insights: Utilizing generative AI models can help analyze vast amounts of data across companies, producing deeper insights to inform decision-making and strategy. Generative AI can also create personalized content and experiences for customers, enhance predictive analytics to anticipate customer needs, and automate the processing and integration of insights, thereby increasing efficiency

By focusing on these core areas, we can unlock the full potential of insights collaboration, driving innovation and operational excellence both within our companies and across the industry.

Pietro Martone

Head of Data & Analytics
MSC Cruises

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