5. Challenges in Data-driven Hotel Infrastructure Assignment Decisions

High quality short-term Hotel Infrastructure Assignment decisions (HIADs) can improve hotel profitability and customer satisfaction. Optimization of HIADs requires addressing two fundamental challenges namely, accurate prediction of customer behaviour and management of interaction complexity and customer reactions. Here, we view the decision environment as a sequence of decisions within the context of customer lifecycles. Each decision is composed of two parts i.e. the hotel’s decision followed by the customer’s decision. We analyze the challenges and conclude that sequential assignment of hotel infrastructure to customers may not be optimal because of limited incorporation of implications of customer reactions in the decision mechanism. Therefore, we need to consider parallel assignment i.e. assignment of hotel infrastructure to the most promising of the likely subsets of potential customers competing for the same time slot. Finally, we discuss a possible data-driven decision support scheme for HIADs that is based on the integration of data mining techniques with micro-simulation.