Hotels and the personalisation challenge | WARC | The Feed
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Hotels and the personalisation challenge
Major hotel chains face a growing challenge in delivering the sort of personalisation that technology has enabled as that same tech becomes a target for cyber criminals.
Why it matters
Personalisation activity rests in marketing departments, which need to have a keen grasp of the niceties of data protection and to consider just how much information they really need to gather – hotels can collect as many as 15 different types of data during a guest’s stay, for example – and whether technology is always a good option to replace traditional face-to-face services such as check-in and on-site payments.
Context
- Hospitality is only just behind the retail and finance & insurance sectors when it comes to data compromises, according to Trustwave.
- Reservation systems, loyalty schemes and hotel wifi networks are all potential targets for hackers.
- As well as the volume of transactional data handled by hotel chains, the information contained in loyalty schemes is hugely valuable; back in 2020, as countries were locking down at the start of the pandemic, for example, Hilton raised $1 billion from an advance sale of loyalty points to its co-brand credit card partner, American Express.
Key quote
“You wouldn’t dream of appointing an executive head chef who didn’t understand hygiene, so why would I appoint a head of marketing who didn’t have an acute understanding of data protection?” – Sean McKeown, company secretary and head of risk and compliance at Irish hotel group Dalata.
Sourced from Financial Times, Hotel Management, Trustwave
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