In September's One for the Road, we asked the experts:
How are you using data to better understand your guests?
Matthew Campion, co-founder and chief analytics officer, Lunchbox Brewing Company, Long Island, N.Y.
We use data from a few different places because no single platform tells us everything we need to know about our guests. Toast gives us purchase and loyalty data, but we also look at email and text engagement, social media, reviews, Untappd activity, and feedback we collect ourselves.
Sometimes we build that feedback into games or contests. For our Polish festival, we created an interactive game called the Kościuszko Climb. Guests chose a character, earned points, and competed on a leaderboard. One way they could earn points was by answering questions about things like beer styles, entertainment, and when they typically visit. It gave us useful information without making people fill out a boring survey.
We use all of that data to help balance our menu and forecast how quickly a beer might sell out. That matters quite a bit for a brewery because we have to decide what to make weeks before it’s ready to serve. We can’t change the beer menu as quickly as a restaurant can change a food special.
It also helps with marketing. We can reach out to guests who haven’t visited in a while or let someone know that a beer they previously showed interest in is back on tap. We’ve seen better engagement and more return visits when the message is actually relevant to the person receiving it.
For us, the point isn’t to let data make every decision. It’s to combine it with what we see and hear in the taproom so we can make better calls about what to brew, what to put on the calendar, and when to communicate with our guests.
Andy Gottlieb, founder of Sandwell in New York City
Sandwell's hospitality is about more deeply understanding the full range of guests' wants, needs and desires so that we can offer an experience designed to delight rather than merely satisfy. These days, there's a flood of data at every touchpoint. To understand our customers, we pull from all of it: POS data, loyalty patterns, review sentiment, even local weather. We then use AI to holistically distill this information into plain English, looking for patterns and trends. This helps us proactively meet guests where the data tells us we need to be, while still finding ways to please guests at the personal level every day.
Zach Jukel, vice president of marketing, Carver Road Hospitality
At Carver Road Hospitality, data plays an important role in helping us understand not only who our guests are, but how, when and why they engage with each of our venues. Across our portfolio, we look at everything from reservation patterns, guest frequency and spend to event performance, digital engagement, reviews and direct guest feedback. With concepts operating across different markets and occasions, that information helps us identify behavioral trends and better understand what resonates locally rather than assuming the same strategy will work everywhere.
The most valuable part, however, is how we turn that data into action. We use those insights to help shape programming, marketing, menu decisions, special events and the overall guest experience. Whether that means identifying a high-performing day-part, understanding which sporting events drive traffic at Flanker, or recognizing opportunities to further personalize the experience at Carversteak. For us, data isn't about replacing hospitality with numbers; it's about giving our teams better information so we can anticipate what our guests want, create more meaningful experiences and ultimately build stronger, longer-lasting relationships with them.
Derek Tadashi Morishita, vice president, food & beverage, SAHARA Las Vegas
We’re using data to understand not only who our guests are, but what actually drives their behavior. This is the important part of knowing our guests and what they are looking for or more importantly why they are looking for something.
From the marketing and events side, we’re looking at reservation trends, booking windows, RSVPs vs. actual attendance, guest spend, repeat visitation, campaign performance and which partnerships or experiences are driving new guests. With events specifically, that data helps us understand which concepts are actually working, what audiences they’re attracting and whether those guests are coming back after the event. If they are coming back, what is driving that? If they aren’t coming back, then it’s our job to find out why not? Price? Experience? Service? Didn’t live up to expectation?
The goal is to use the insights above to make smarter decisions around where we spend, what we program, who we target and what we repeat.
When it comes to product mixes within outlets, this is huge for us. We look at this daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly for different reasons or exercises. This data tells us exactly what our guests like. If the guests are not ordering something or sending a dish back consistently, we have to adapt and change. I have always had the same mindset as an operator, it doesn’t matter if I like a dish or drink, it matters if our consumer does. Operators who forget this, don’t survive, yet more importantly do not provide an experience a guest wants time and time again.
Steven Waters, owner-operator of FiNO in Denver
Used the right way, data lets us remember people, which is the core of good hospitality.
Every operator has heard the question, "I was here a couple of years ago and the bartender made me this incredible cocktail I loved. Do you still have it? Can you make it again?" Historically, the honest answer was usually no. The best bartenders and servers have always kept a mental file on their regulars, but if someone leaves the team, or a guest doesn't come back for two years, that knowledge is gone.
If that visit and that drink are logged to the guest's profile, we can go back, find exactly what was made, and recreate that drink for them. That's huge for hotels, since so many of our guests are traveling. Someone might visit us once a year, or once every few years. By indexing data, we can turn what would normally live as a fleeting memory into a long-term, actionable log.
When we know a guest's tastes, we can invite them back to the specific events, pop-ups, and educational experiences that will actually resonate with them, rather than blasting everyone with everything. Ultimately, we're using data to remember our guests well and to make sure the experiences they've had with us don't get lost.
At the same time, saving guest information is a matter of trust. We're very conscious that privacy comes first, so we treat it with care.