Improve Your Hospitality Analytics with Text Analytics & NLP

The online media landscape creates new challenges for the hospitality industry. To keep up, hospitality analytics providers are turning to text analytics and natural language processing (NLP). This article features the story of Revinate, who use the Semantria NLP API to deliver better guest feedback analytics for hotels and other hospitality stakeholders. Revinate’s own clients, in turn, use these insights informed decisions to improve experiences and increase customer lifecycle value.

Congratulations to our partners Revinate and GuestRevu, winners of 2019 HotelTechAwards in Email Marketing & CRM, and Guest Feedback & Brand Management!

The online media landscape creates big challenges for hospitality providers

Before the Internet, word-of-mouth was the primary way for the average person people to talk about their experiences with companies, products and services.

Word-of-mouth still matters, of course. But the online media landscape is a strange one. People talk about their experiences all the time, many times a day, with complete strangers.

On social media, review sites, in the comments of news articles and blog posts, the stories they tell and the opinions they express form a goldmine of information for hospitality providers to mine.

maid making bed while a hospitality sentiment wordcloud and other charts and graphs are displayed

Don’t forget: just because someone isn’t a celebrity or doesn’t have a large social following, doesn’t mean their comments won’t go viral. In part, data analytics companies help their customers by providing monitoring services so hospitality providers don’t get caught unawares. But, as the story of Revinate shows, natural language data is a tricky beast to handle.

How Revinate transformed their hospitality analytics platform

One of our partners, Revinate, provides a cutting-edge hospitality analytics platform for transforming real customer feedback into revenue. Revinate does this by employing our text analytics and sentiment analysis to help their customers quickly transform mountains of unstructured comments, reviews, tweets, and survey responses into useful data and insights.

5 Ways AI and Big Data are Transforming the Hotel Industry – HospitalityTech.com

Initially, Revinate employed another text analytics provider. But as they grew, the Revinate team found they needed better scalability and performance optimization. For a high-quality solution they knew they could grow with, Revinate reached out to Lexalytics, an InMoment company.

web of connected icons

When Revinate decided to partner with Lexalytics, they faced a dilemma. How could they transition as quickly as possible, with minimal disruption to their clients? Fortunately, our services team has a proven track record in making these transitions. Working closely with us, Revinate made the transition to Semantria without barely a hiccup.

Tuning and configuring for hospitality analytics

Natural-language comments are full of slang, jargon, double-meanings, and industry-specific terminology. These inconsistencies easily throw an improperly-configured text analytics system out of balance.

That’s why Revinate worked with our experts to properly tune and configure their solution. Together, we ported more than 2,700 categories, 200 hotel topics, and 100 restaurant topics, in nearly 10 languages, into Semantria.

screenshot of a Revinate dashboard
Source: Revinate

Related article: How to Build a Data-Driven Voice of Customer Program to Increase Revenue and Reduce Churn

This level of tuning can be very time-consuming. It’s especially difficult when your text analytics provider doesn’t offer much in the way of configuration tools. But between Lexalytics’ pre-configured hospitality industry pack, our skilled professional services team, and Revinate’s expertise, we made the transition quickly and efficiently.

“…With their partnership, we met our goals on time, delivered the best possible product, and were set up to ensure continued success.” – Matt Zarem, Senior Director of Product at Revinate

Today, hospitality providers leverage Lexalytics’ technology through Revinate’s platform to hear what guests have to say about their experiences, in their own words, including:

  • What people are saying about individual locations
  • Trending discussion topics
  • Responses to recent service improvements

What’s more, Lexalytics’ multi-layered approach to sentiment analysis means that Revinate’s customers can see not just how people feel, but why they feel that way.

screenshot of a Revinate dashboard
Source: Revinate

Supercharge your hospitality analytics with text analytics

This is the power of the Lexalytics approach to hospitality analytics. Using our easy-to-deploy APIs (available on-premise or in the cloud), you can add powerful, reliable analysis of natural-language text documents into your own analytics platform with a fraction of the labor of other solutions.

Related: The Crucial Piece that NPS Misses, and How to Fill The Gap

In turn, your own hospitality provider end-users can finally hear guests tell their own stories, in their own words. By giving your clients the ability to gather, process, analyze and visualize diverse sources of guest feedback, you’ll empower them with better data and actionable insights.

[Lexalytics-Revinate-Case-Study-2019.png]
Full Revinate-Lexalytics case study

Summary

The online media landscape creates new challenges for hospitality providers. Data analytics companies are getting ahead of the curve by integrating advanced text analytics and natural language processing into their products.

Hospitality providers, in turn, use these platforms to analyze free-text surveys, comments and reviews. Then, they use those insights to make informed recommendations and decisions to improve guest experiences.

Further reading and hospitality analytics resources

Download the Revinate-Lexalytics case study

Explore our blog series on Analyzing Airport Reviews Using NLP

Browse McKinsey’s report on Advanced Analytics in Hospitality

Read HospitalityTech.com’s article on 5 Ways AI and Big Data are Transforming the Hotel Industry