Choice, whose properties include Clarion Hotels, Comfort Inn, Econo Lodge, Quality Inn, Rodeway Inn and others, is in the midst of moving to Version 6.1 of Initiate Identity Hub software, from Initiate Software Inc. of Chicago.
Identity Hub, which Choice first began using in mid-2004, helps the hotel chain match the 100,000 new guest bookings it receives daily from its nearly 6,000 properties to those in its existing customer database, said Choice CIO Gary Thompson.
With Version 6.1 and a new services-oriented property management system that its franchisees are deploying, Choice wants hotel guests to be linked to records in its Informix data warehouse as soon as they check in.
"We need to be able to do on-the-fly identification of our guests," said Thompson, a 15-year veteran of Choice.
That would allow Choice, which can now provide personalized offers and perks in real-time only to guests who check in with their loyalty program membership numbers, to tailor its marketing efforts better and help create what Thompson described as a yield management system equal in sophistication to what major airlines use today.
With 6,000 hotels and motels worldwide, Choice is second only to Wyndham Worldwide Corp. in the number of hotels it holds. Wyndham Worldwide operates Super 8, Days Inn, Ramada and others.
Though based in Silver Spring, Md., almost all of Choice's 170-strong IT staffers are based in Phoenix.
Despite that lean team, Choice built its current all-in-one property management software, called Profit Manager, which it released 10 years ago for use by its franchise hotels. Choice added CRM software from Unica Corp. in 2002. Two years later, it began using Identity Hub.
"It's always a challenge to get enough information from our guests to uniquely identify them," Thompson said. "Identity Hub sits in the background and makes sure all of the info the CRM system is pulling is de-duped."
How do duplicates emerge? "You can transpose the first and middle names, you can have people giving nicknames, typo errors, people getting married, etc.," said Scott Schumacher, senior vice president and chief scientist at Initiate.
Initiate's CDI software evaluates multiple factors to calculate a statistical probability that a customer record is for the same person as another record. That, Schumacher said, is in contrast with the practices of competitors, who he claims generally use a more "deterministic" method that is "less tolerant of errors" and slows down quickly as more rules are added.
The software also lets companies fine-tune how aggressively Initiate should match customer records. Hotels such as Choice may set a lower level than health care companies, Schumacher said, where "merging two patients' records is a very bad thing. The typical false-positive ratio that is tolerated is 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a million."
In September, Initiate released Version 7.2 of Identity Hub. Initiate was first used in the health care industry but now claims 100 customers in various markets. Besides Choice Hotels, Hyatt is using Initiate. In the financial arena, customers include Wells Fargo, WellPoint Inc. and Countrywide Financial Corp.
Schumacher said Initiate's customers can run Identity Hub with any of the major relational databases. Or they can run data through data-cleansing software before handing it off to Identity Hub.
"We think cleaning up addresses is a good idea, though we tend to recommend to customers that they keep two versions ' cleansed and uncleansed versions," Schumacher said. "We don't recommend that you clean up names."
According to Schumacher, many users are matching names in less than a second or in real time. That's something Choice's Thompson is looking forward to by upgrading to Version 6.1. "We needed speed, speed, speed," he said.
Besides upgrading Identity Hub, Choice is rolling out a replacement for Profit Manager -- another software application it built in-house, called ChoiceAdvantage. Using a lightweight client software that connects to Identity Hub and the data warehouse, ChoiceAdvantage will be more powerful and much cheaper for the company's franchisees compared with Profit Manager, said Choice's Thompson. He expects ChoiceAdvantage to be in all of the North American hotels within several years.
"It will put us ahead of our competitors," he said.