Data Gathering and Analysis in the Hospitality Industry

Gather, describe, and analyze data on the hospitality industry to extract meaningful business information.

Description

Making effective business decisions requires gathering and analyzing data. In the hospitality industry we have access to significant amounts of data about customers, buying patterns, pricing, occupancy rates, etc. With a solid understanding of basic statistical analysis, a manager can begin to make sense of all these numbers and extract meaningful business information. A critical first step in many analyses is using surveys to gather data, and this course provides a step-by-step approach to creating and using surveys in your organization. This course also uses hospitality scenarios and hands-on exercises and labs to provide you with the skills needed to gather, describe, and analyze data.

Who Should Take This Course?

This course is important for managers and individuals at any level who need to analyze data for their organization--especially those responsible for project and business planning, market research, revenue management, or designing customer or employee satisfaction surveys.

We strongly recommend this course to those who have completed or plan to complete eCornell courses in scenario planning, hospitality marketing, or restaurant revenue management.

Course Format

eCornell takes a problem-based approach to learning, building its courses around realistic case studies and scenarios. All courses are self-paced and are facilitated by an eCornell instructor who leads the online discussions and is available to answer any questions about the course content. This course includes the following modules:

Describing and Analyzing Data

• Hospitable Statistics
• Graphing
• Mean, Median, and Other Measures
• The Normal Distribution

Gathering Data

• Sourcing Data
• Designing Surveys

Benefits to the Learner

After completing this course, participants will be able to:

• Discuss applications of statistics in the hospitality industry
• List common ways in which statistics can be misused to distort or misrepresent data
• Apply the appropriate graph for a given data set
• Calculate, define, and apply descriptive statistics including median, mean, and standard deviation
• Use Excel's display and analysis tools for graphs, PivotTables, descriptive statistics, and optimal problem solutions
• Describe the normal distribution
• Describe and select appropriate methods of gathering data
• Choose appropriate survey methods

Authoring Faculty

Sheryl E. Kimes, Ph.D., Professor

Sponsoring School

Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration

Total Learning Time

Approximately 5-6 hours over a period of two weeks

Certificate Information

This course can be applied toward the following certificate:

• Hospitality Marketing