Most hotels are sitting on more guest data than they realize. The problem is that it is scattered across a dozen systems that were never built to talk to each other. Instead of one guest, hotels end up with fragments of the same guest, each one telling only part of the story.
Ascent360 CEO Scott Buelter joined the GAIN Momentum podcast to discuss the doors that open up for hoteliers when they can finally unify and enrich that data into a single, golden guest record: uncovering guests they didn’t even know they had, using RFM scoring to predict a guest’s next action, and more.
What Is a Customer Data Platform and Why Do Hotels Need One?
A customer data platform, or CDP, is designed to centralize guest data across all source systems, including PMS, spa, booking, F&B, golf, and more, deduplicating it down to the individual and household level, and making it usable across the property. That means recognizing high-value guests versus who is at risk of lapsing and treating them accordingly.
The payoff isn’t just operational. When guests are treated well, revenue and profitability follow. Guest experience and the bottom line aren’t competing priorities; they’re the same goal viewed from two angles.
How Does Guest Deduplication Actually Work?
Deduplication starts with nickname tables and phonetic matching to recognize that “Robert,” “Bob,” and “Bobby” in three different systems are the same guest. As Buelter put it:
“You can imagine that Robert, Bob, and Bobby to a PMS looks like three different people, but to us, we’ve got nickname tables. We phoneticize the names, and we can actually say those are all the same person.”
Deduplication also has to work at the household level, not just the individual level. A guest might look like an infrequent visitor to the front desk while their spouse spent $12,000 at the hotel spa that year. Without household-level matching, teams cannot see the full picture of that guest’s value.
The effect compounds at scale. Buelter described a property whose database shrank from 300,000 records to 220,000 once duplicates across the PMS, spa, and F&B systems were resolved. What looked like a 15 percent return rate turned out to be closer to 24 percent because the “new” guests weren’t new at all; they were the same loyal guests, just scattered across systems that couldn’t recognize them.
What Is RFM Scoring and Why Is It Such a Strong Predictor?
RFM stands for recency, frequency, and monetary value: how recently a guest stayed, how often they visit, and how much they spend. Ranking every guest into quintiles on each dimension, one through five, creates 125 distinct segments. A guest who scores five on all three has stayed recently, visits often, and spends well; a guest scoring one across the board looks nothing like them, even if both technically qualify as “past guests.”
The score earns its keep well beyond a marketing campaign. Buelter pointed to the call center as an example: when an agent picks up the phone, the guest’s RFM score shows up right alongside their stay history, so the agent knows in seconds whether they’re talking to an occasional visitor or a VIP guest on their tenth stay. It’s a simple number, but it’s one of the strongest predictors of whether that guest is likely to book again.
Why Do Relevant Campaigns Outperform Mass Sends?
More emails don’t mean more bookings, especially when those emails are impersonal, generic messages that only apply to a small percentage of the guests receiving them.
The stronger approach is sending fewer, more precisely segmented messages built around specific guest behavior. An abandoned cart campaign is a good example: a guest chooses dates, selects a room, and then abandons the reservation before hitting “Book Now.” Instead of a lost opportunity, the right automated message at the right moment can reclaim that booking. Buelter noted that abandoned cart emails can pull an 80 percent open rate and an 18 percent conversion rate, compared to roughly 4 percent for an untargeted send, because the hotel is following up on an action the guest already took rather than guessing at what they might want.
Where Is Hospitality CRM Headed Next?
Marketing built the CDP, but Buelter doesn’t think marketing will be the only one using it in a few years.
“The data asset, the CDP, stops being [just] a marketing tool and a marketing asset, and it starts looking more and more like the resort’s operating system. Everybody in the hotel should be using that data to do what they can’t do, which is know every single guest.”
That’s already showing up at the front desk. Take Ascent360’s Chrome Extension: when a guest walks into the lobby, front desk staff can pull up everything the hotel knows about that guest in real time, right in the browser they’re already using. Stay history, upcoming bookings, preferences, and loyalty status are all right at your team’s fingertips.
The goal is simple: use the data you already have to recognize every guest the moment they arrive and give each one a stay that feels personal from start to finish.
Curious what your own guest data could tell you? Request a demo and see how Ascent360 turns scattered guest records into one golden guest record you can put to work across every department.