This insight summarises Analytics Was Never Supposed to Be a Department, by Benjamin Jost, Co-Founder and CEO of TrustYou, published on Hospitality Net on 2 November 2026. Jost discloses that TrustYou sells software in this category.
The questions nobody asks. "Show me tomorrow's arrival list, sorted by customer lifetime value" goes unasked because the answer needs someone with access to both the PMS and the CDP. Jost writes that "the questions a hotel company does not ask describe its analytics maturity far better than the reports it produces."
An org chart shaped by tooling. For about thirty years, data tools needed trained operators, which created specialist roles such as revenue management. Everyone else waited for outputs, and the "monthly reporting cycle still feels like an event."
Volume, not speed. Speed will soon stop being a differentiator. The larger change is that question volume rises by an order of magnitude once asking costs only a typed sentence. Jost describes a hotel group producing twelve guest-experience reports a year as "functionally, asking twelve questions a year." The useful answer, Jost argues, usually sits a few follow-up questions in.
Cross-silo questions matter most. Jost's examples include correlating ADR with guest satisfaction across a portfolio, and finding which properties saw a cleanliness drop after a housekeeping hours change. In Jost's words, "a hotel is a single business that we happen to have instrumented as eight separate ones."
Two preconditions. These questions need resolvable identities, agreed definitions and a shared place for data, so the data work moves upstream rather than disappearing. Access matters too. Limit the tool to a few head-office users and general managers stay in the queue, while local, unusual questions never get asked. Jost's figures are illustrative, and the article presents no independent data.
AIHA practical takeaway. Ask vendors who may ask questions: do all existing logins get access on day one, and is pricing by usage or by role? Track Jost's three measures: distinct questions per month, the share crossing system boundaries and the share from outside head office. Near-zero numbers, Jost says, mean you bought faster reports, not better analytics. Before any trial, pick two or three questions your teams have carried for years and confirm the identity and definition work they depend on.