When we say we ‘live, breathe and understand hospitality’… we really do. We have hands on operational responsibility for live hospitality venues and built our platform to identify guest intelligence opportunities.

John Snyder, our founder, sold his Grapeshot contextual data software company to Oracle Corporation in 2018. Grapeshot's lead investor repaid its whole venture capital fund 'twice over' with proceeds from the exit: called a "double dragon" - this is a rarer breed than the tech "unicorn". Average investor return was 15X. Grapeshot sold data in 148 countries, more than 2 million times a second.

Rose Hospitality is his next push on context and getting guest intelligence right, for the hospitality industry, at scale.

Design is everything in modern technology and hospitality.

Information must not just be in a database somewhere, but accessible, in that moment, for a staff member to get a specific job done.

Making use of profile data has to be designed well: to be easy, fun and convenient to both collect, and, to be used by a staff member to create an additional economic or experiential impact.

Also there is no point designing things just for the back-office. Most Housekeeper, Maintenance, Kitchen, FOH staff are constantly on the move. Armed with smartphones or mini-iPads, they have one hand, one finger, and indeed just one moment in which to make decisions. So the in-view profile information has to be relevant to their job function, specific tasks and SOPs, in that moment.

The same goes for designing the logic of data. How can everyday workers see information easily, when the data within the database is so deep and complex. No-one likes a long list - information should be ranked and curated for the task in hand: for the job to be done!

APIs are the modern way to write software, allowing us to embed functionality into each others software interfaces. Google Maps and Eventbrite for example, each offer rich functionality within other companies' interfaces, much like a modern website does, rendering the outputs of tens or more API calls from third-party micro-services, in real-time.

In contextual advertising we had to deliver API answers in 10 milliseconds, as the whole ad-auction process lasted 50 milliseconds, in the blink of an eye, as each consumer loaded their chosen web page. On one system system alone we did 100 billion API calls per day.

Imagine FOH loading a guest booking, or Kitchens reviewing next week's Big Event. Deeper, broader profiles need to fill their PMS or staff app screen, like a web page, to provide the salient guest intelligence, in real-time. Context is everything, and there is no point making the staff having to hunt down manually any pre-typed profile data stored somewhere on the intranet. Guest intelligence needs to be in the moment: smarter and in real-time.

Imagine Front Desk reviewing a guest booking, or Kitchens planning next week's functions and events. Deeper, broader profiles need to fill their PMS or staff app screen, like a web page, to provide the salient guest intelligence, in real-time. Context is everything, and there is no point making the staff having to hunt down manually any pre-typed profile data stored somewhere on the intranet. Guest intelligence needs to be in the moment: smarter and in real-time.

Cloud services are becoming mainstream as maintenance, monitoring and scale-up/scale-down decisions take operations off-site - with benefits of cheaper operational costs, better redundancy and End of Service (EOS) resilience planning, and relying on service providers to invest in shared stacks and infrastructures.

This is precisely the opportunity for Guest Intelligence. 

A guest has a ski-ing accident, so their hospitality needs immediately change: "room closer to the elevator please!" The housing of stale and duplicate profiles needs to be eradicated from costly internal systems - and centralised global web services, focused just on guest profile data services and no more, should reduce cost of ownership, provide  more current guest intelligence and deploy industry-shared mechanisms for easily segmenting audiences based on sets of preferences, both hard and soft, global or local, for opted-in CRM communications (newsletters, upsells, promotions post-departure).

Rose Hospitality is accruing guest intelligence and building deeper guest profiles over time and opting-in consumers beyond the "legitimate use' window by venue ID. This means consumer opt-outs are defined by "who" asked the question (ie the venue), and not by the guest's own answer (which the consumer owns and controls already).