Business Intelligence is undoubtedly one of the buzzwords on the international scene. With information technologies having a huge impact on companies and the way we look at business, currently, to keep up with trends it is necessary to constantly innovate and have the technologies themselves as support , so that assertive and intelligent decisions can be made.

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However, although the 'fashion' has become more pronounced in recent years, the term Business Intelligence was originally created by Richard Millar Devens in 1865, in his work Cyclopaedia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes . In this, the author used the term to illustrate how the bank employee, Sir Henry Firnesse, profited by receiving and acting on information about the environment, before his competitors. And in reality, the concept was already applied by ancient civilizations - for example, the ancient people of the East used some basic concepts of BI when crossing information obtained from nature (such as the analysis of periods of rain and drought) for the benefit of their harvests, or even when analyzing the behavior of the tides and their influence on fishing. This data made it possible to obtain information that was already used to make important decisions.

As Sun Tzu states in The Art of War , “to win, a person must have all the knowledge of their weaknesses and virtues, and especially know the weaknesses and virtues of their enemy, as the lack of this knowledge can result in defeat”. Transposing this concept to the business world, it is easy to see that each company must be aware of its capabilities and weaknesses, but also market trends and also know how to identify its competing companies .

The concept of Business Intelligence is therefore nothing more than the knowledge that each company must have about its business and its customers in this era of globalization, thus allowing it to analyze weaknesses and strengths and carry out planning that allows it to find strategic solutions for its business .

Increasingly, decision-making must be based on knowledge of data relating to the operation and less on the manager's ' feeling ', on tools such as the 'achometer', or on trial and error operations. The main objective of Business Intelligence is nothing more than to transform data into information, which will result in decisions, which will be transformed into actions based on knowledge , as described in the so-called Intelligence Hierarchy defined by Liebowitz.

Moving on to practice: let's imagine that as a hotelier I seek to captivate the Asian market and intend to promote my unit at fairs and other actions. For this purpose, it will be important to know after analyzing the data that this type of guest books at least 9 months in advance. Or if I have a resort focused on the golf segment, it will be interesting to realize that the Nordics have an average stay of 20 days, so there is little point in offering promotions of 8 nights + 2 nights.

Fortunately, nowadays, the information that Business Intelligence allows us to obtain goes far beyond Revenue Management analysis . Making use of Big Data , a variety of precious data can be obtained for various decision-making processes , such as:

• Reservation cancellation patterns
• Advance booking standards
• Relationship between revenues and costs versus guest occupancy/segmentation
• Revenue forecasts for departments other than accommodation based on guest segmentation
• Optimization of purchases and stocks depending on occupancy forecast
• Among many others.

Business Intelligence is increasingly used in large international hotel chains - Marriot, Hilton, Konover Hotel Group, among many others - as well as by other industry players such as Booking or Expedia.

The truth is that it is here to stay, it still has a lot to give and the advantages are immense. For example:

• Allows you to better identify data and measure effectiveness
• Allows greater control over income and expenses
• Allows you to plan and simulate with greater assertiveness, anticipating actions in relation to external factors
• Allows you to enhance the return on investment (ROI) in Marketing
• Offers greater speed in analyzing information, making it more competitive

However, in order to have all this information, we cannot forget that one of the main pillars in this process is Data Mining , which consists of three fundamental steps:

• Database setup
• Data mining
• Validation of results

Once again, the key to success is always related to the quality of the data obtained .

Therefore, we can conclude that in the current scenario, having a BI solution is not only recommended, but essential as it allows companies to quickly analyze different sources of information and transform them into business opportunities . Combining data analysis with the manager's knowledge, a successful operation can be achieved more quickly.

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