The cost usually shows up as translation. Somebody renaming rooms, converting square meters to square feet, figuring out whether “Theater (max)” assumed a stage, and deciding which column holds the number the portfolio actually needs.
Each translation is manageable on its own. Repeat it across hotels, reports and projects and it becomes work that never shows up in the platform price.
I’d measure the translation before proposing a grand new data architecture.
Find the mismatch that keeps coming back
Send the same information request to several hotels. Which facts come back consistently? Which ones need interpretation or a follow-up email?
One hotel lists “Salon A/B,” another lists “Salons A and B combined,” and a third lists the combined room under a name nobody’s used since 2019. A spreadsheet can collect all three without making them comparable.
Our digital property model gives you a structure for tying each space to its information.
Standardize the meaning, not just the columns
Agree on how a room is identified, which units to use, what the setup labels mean, who approved the fact and what to do when it’s missing. Keep local names where people need them, mapped to one shared definition.
Don’t force a room into a field that misdescribes it. A shared model needs room for real differences while keeping the comparisons that matter.
OpenTravel’s messaging model is good background on how travel systems share data. Each property’s mapping still needs someone to check it.
Give every hotel a local owner
Someone at the property has to confirm the fact and understand how a change reaches the portfolio. Otherwise the central dataset turns into a stale copy with very professional-looking headers.
Cleanup takes effort. Compare that one-time work with the translation the team already does over and over, using what you actually observed, not a made-up savings percentage.
Test one repeat request
After a limited cleanup, send the same kind of request again. Track how long reconciliation took, which facts are still unresolved and which errors got caught.
The goal is an answer that travels with fewer misunderstandings. Standardizing earns its keep when it removes repeated guesswork without erasing what makes each hotel different.
