OTA Insight: Empowering Smarter Revenue and Distribution Decisions

OTA Insight empowers hoteliers to make smarter revenue and distribution decisions through its market-leading suite of cloud-based business intelligence solutions including Rate Insight, Parity Insight and Revenue Insight. With its core platform providing live updates, 24/7 support from the customer success team, and a highly-intuitive and customizable dashboard, OTA Insight aims to provide its customers with a simple-to-understand, real-time actionable data that enables them to set the right price and sell their rooms in the right place.

The company's mission is to help hospitality professionals understand and leverage data and become a global leader in intelligence for this industry. OTA Insight does this by providing hoteliers with user-friendly tools that help them make smarter revenue and distribution decisions.

The journey to establish OTA Insight began in 2012 when the three co-founders (Adriaan Coppens, Gino Engels, and Matthias Geeroms) witnessed firsthand struggles that hoteliers were going through to understand the changing pricing and distribution landscape during the London Olympics. From this start point, OTA Insight's data visualization and analytics platform was conceived. Years of constant development and collaboration with hotel partners has resulted in a simple-to-use, live business intelligence platform which has now grown to become the preferred revenue management solution for over 20,000 independent, local and global chain properties in 140 countries.

The Steadfast Leader

Since the launch of OTA Insight in 2012, Adriaan Coppens has grown the business from a startup to an established industry leader and innovator with 100+ employees. Under Adriaan's leadership, OTA Insight has disrupted the hospitality technology and business intelligence space with world-class products that empower accommodation providers to make smarter revenue and distribution decisions through simplified business intelligence.

Adriaan's proudest achievement has been the development of a user-friendly business intelligence dashboard that enable hoteliers to make better rate decisions faster, through actionable data insights and ultimately has become an invaluable tool in their daily rate and revenue decisions as part of their jobs.

He continues to work closely with hoteliers, industry groups and industry-related media directly to ensure OTA Insight continues to be at the forefront of business intelligence development and provide hoteliers with the right data insights which can help them drive their distribution and rate decisions to grow revenue and profit.

Turning Data into Actionable Insight

In an industry where standing still is not an option, Adriaan is at the forefront of driving the business and its product development forward. With a firm belief in continuous client dialogue and ensuring the tools are the best in the market, product improvements and creation of better solutions are driven by listening to customer requirements and feedback.

Adriaan has an unfailing commitment to disrupting and in turn, enhancing the norm in the revenue and distribution categories. His strategic management, development, execution planning has helped spearhead the launch of new products which continue to help accommodation providers with actionable insights distilled from the ever-growing datasets surrounding the hospitality industry.

With hotels having to deal with an ever-increasing tsunami of data, OTA Insight's single-minded focus is to turn this data into actionable intelligence so that hoteliers spend their time making decisions instead of deciphering and formatting data. OTA Insight has already achieved impressive results with its solution for publicly available data and now the aim is to achieve the same level of success for the internal facing booking and revenue data. OTA Insight's goal is to make revenue management simpler through more intuitive, data-driven business decisions – freeing up customers to focus on their hospitality expertise and tending to guest experience, and not managing data analytics and technology.

Building Products with Customers Focus

OTA Insight has been able to understand the complexity that hoteliers have to deal with on a day to day basis ranging from enormous excel reports to outdated business intelligence tools, by asking what decisions the hotelier needs to make and with which pieces of information they need to make these decisions. OTA Insight has been able to distill this down to simplified data solutions for hoteliers.

Beyond this, OTA Insight team spends a significant amount of time on testing and developing the most intuitive way to visualize this information. It's this next step the company takes with hoteliers to decipher the data distilled that truly helps to set apart OTA Insight as a truly simple-to-use solution that provides real-time, actionable insights.

Facing Data Challenges Head On

Commenting on challenges Adriaan said, "The major challenge was maintaining our high bar for data quality while adding more and more data sources. It is easy to add new data sources if you're willing to drop your quality bar and settle for the lowest common denominator.  We are proud to have a market leading position through maintaining excellent data quality whilst adding a number of new data sources, but it cost us blood, sweat and tears."

When the Work Speaks for Itself

OTA Insight has been recognized over the years for their many accomplishments through prestigious internal and external awards and honors. Some of the notable ones include:

•  Named Accel Top 100 European Most Promising SaaS Companies in 2016 and 2017

•  Nominated as a finalist for Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) Europe's Best Technology Innovation in 2017

Moreover, Adriaan and Gino have been awarded IDeaS Global Partner Ecosystem Award for Innovation and Client Focus in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Both have been nominated as one of the Top Extraordinary minds and contributors to the industry of Commercial and Revenue Optimization by Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) in Europe and US.

Picture for the Bright Future

The past few years have been characterized by the democratization of business intelligence. Earlier, organizations needed a skilled programmer to build reports and now building reports are easy and accessible to everybody ("self-service BI"). The next wave is likely to be comprised of pre-built reports and pre-built connectors, which is already visible in the remarkable growth of Domo. Customers will rely on these pre-built reports to answer 95 percent of their questions and build their own reports to answer the remaining 5 percent of the questions.

OTA Insight is an example of this trend, with a team of over 20 engineers and product managers who work on building the best dashboard with the best data visualizations for hoteliers. The company's customers are able to connect to OTA Insight's API and build their own visualizations in a business intelligence solution. The customers rely heavily on OTA Insight's expertise for a user-friendly dashboard and use its export capability and their spreadsheet skills when they encounter a hotel-specific data challenge that they can't answer directly.