7 Essential Data Products for Leaders in Hospitality, Airlines, and Travel

Timing is everything, and nowhere is that more true than In the travel and hospitality industry. A missed flight connection, a room that isn't ready for a weary traveler, or a loyalty preference that goes ignored isn't just a minor data glitch; it’s a direct hit to the bottom line and a fracture in brand trust.

For decades, organizations in this space have been navigating a "sea of data," yet they frequently struggle to translate it into tangible value. Data is often trapped in a labyrinth of siloed legacy Global Distribution Systems (GDS), inconsistent Property Management Systems (PMS), and fragmented CRM tools.

To cut through this complexity, industry leaders are increasingly embracing AI. They are moving away from simply collecting and documenting raw data and toward a data product mindset. By strategically creating curated, reusable, and trusted data assets designed to solve specific business problems, travel and hospitality brands are doing more than just cleaning up their databases—they are building the essential foundation for the future of AI.

Why data products are essential for reliable AI

As organizations rush to deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI, a critical challenge has emerged: AI "hallucinations." These occur when a model lacks the specific business context required to provide an accurate answer. For an airline or hotel group, an AI that hallucinates a flight schedule or a room rate isn't just unhelpful; it’s a liability.

Data products serve as the knowledge layer that bridges this gap. By providing metadata for reliable AI, data products offer the guardrails, definitions, and quality signals that make AI outputs trustworthy. Instead of an AI agent searching through thousands of raw, cryptic tables, it interacts with a data product—a packaged, ready-to-use asset that has already been vetted for accuracy, ownership, and business logic.

When you treat data as a product, you provide the AI with the "who, what, where, and why" of the information. This context ensures that when a business user asks a natural language query, the AI retrieves an answer rooted in governed truth rather than a statistical guess. This is the difference between an AI that simply "speaks" and one that "knows."

Scaling "agentic" travel experiences

The industry is currently moving beyond simple chatbots and toward Agentic AI—systems that don't just provide information but take proactive actions to solve problems. Imagine an AI agent that detects an incoming storm, identifies at-risk passengers, and automatically proposes rebooking options based on real-time seat availability and loyalty tier.

This level of automation requires a high degree of data maturity. A powerful example of this in action is Marriott International.  For Marriott’s 35+ brands, AI is evolving from a utility into a "digital companion" for associates. This transition relies on data products that act as a foundation of trust, incorporating complete metadata, up-to-date policies, and transparent lineage.

By using Alation to build this "marketplace" of trusted data, Marriott ensures that their move toward agentic AI is built on a foundation of trusted, discoverable data that employees can rely on to make split-second decisions.

Seven high-impact data products for travel & hospitality

To move from a "catalog everything" approach to a value-driven strategy, organizations should focus on building specific, high-impact data products. These are curated, governed assets designed for specific personas and outcomes.

1. Flight delay & disruption prediction

This product forecasts potential delays caused by weather, maintenance, or air traffic control constraints. It converts raw flight history and weather feeds into a "Risk Score" that enables the airline to transition from reactive chaos to proactive management.

• Recommended uses: Preemptive passenger notifications via mobile app, optimized crew reassignment to prevent "timing out," and predictive maintenance scheduling to address mechanical risks before they ground an aircraft.

• Target personas:

  • Operations Control Center (OCC): Uses the risk scores to manage daily flight schedules and minimize cascading network delays.

  • Customer service leads: Use the data to proactively rebook passengers before a storm hits, reducing gate-side congestion.

  • Pilots & crew schedulers: Adjust crew pairings in real-time to ensure legal rest requirements are met despite disruptions.

2. Ancillary revenue optimization engine

Ancillaries—like baggage fees, seat upgrades, and in-flight meals—are high-margin revenue streams. This engine uses loyalty data and trip characteristics to deliver the right offer at the right moment.

• Recommended uses: Real-time seat upgrade offers during mobile check-in and "Contextual Cross-Selling" (e.g., suggesting rental cars or travel insurance based on the destination and trip purpose).

• Target personas:

  • Ancillary Product Managers: Use the product to identify which bundles (e.g., "Lounge + Extra Bag") are converting best across specific routes.

  • E-Commerce/Digital Product Teams: Integrate the data product’s API into the booking flow to present personalized offers without slowing down page load times.

  • Revenue Managers: Analyze price elasticity for non-ticket items to optimize total revenue per passenger.

3. Hotel room demand forecasting

This model forecasts occupancy levels across properties to balance price with expected demand. It is essential for managing the "perishable inventory" of a room night.

• Recommended uses: Seasonal demand projections for regional events (like festivals or sports), group booking management for large conferences, and overbooking risk analysis to minimize guest "walks."

• Target personas:

  • Hotel Revenue Managers: Use the forecasts to set Average Daily Rates (ADR) that maximize yield during peak seasons.

  • Property Managers: Align housekeeping and front-desk staffing levels to the forecasted arrival curves to prevent long check-in lines.

  • Marketing Teams: Use low-occupancy forecasts to trigger targeted email promotions to local loyalty members for "staycations."

4. Customer 360 traveler profile

This product provides a "Golden Record" of a traveler’s preferences across all touchpoints, from preferred room floor levels to meal choices and past support interactions.

• Recommended uses: VIP identification for high-spend travelers, personalized trip recommendations, and proactive service that anticipates needs during travel disruptions.

• Target personas:

  • Loyalty Program Managers: Use the profiles to personalize tier benefits and design "surprise and delight" moments for elite members.

  • Customer Service Agents: Access full customer context during a call or chat to resolve issues faster without asking the traveler to repeat their history.

  • Marketing Strategy Leads: Analyze booking frequency and trip purpose (Business vs. Leisure) to segment campaigns more effectively.

5. Onboard supply chain optimization

By aligning catering and amenity inventory with route-specific consumption patterns, this product minimizes waste and reduces aircraft weight—a key driver of fuel costs.

• Recommended uses: Matching meal and beverage loads to forecasted manifests, tracking waste reduction trends by route, and sharing accurate orders with third-party catering vendors.

• Target personas:

  • Catering & Logistics Managers: Use the pick-lists to ensure every flight is provisioned correctly while reducing the disposal of unused perishables.

  • Procurement Teams: Manage supplier contracts and inventory levels for amenities like pillows, blankets, and entertainment kits.

  • Sustainability Officers: Monitor the reduction in food waste and fuel burn to report on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) goals.

6. Airport facility & terminal dashboard

This product monitors terminal capacity, security checkpoint flow, and gate utilization to maximize passenger throughput and experience.

• Recommended uses: Real-time security wait-time monitoring to trigger staffing adjustments and aligning retail/dining vendor hours to actual passenger traffic patterns.

• Target personas:

  • Airport Operations Control: Oversee real-time coordination of gates and ground services to minimize "tarmac wait" times.

  • Security Operations (TSA/Border Force): Dynamically adjust the number of open lanes based on real-time arrival curves.

  • Concessions & Retail Managers: Use traffic data to optimize staffing in terminal shops and food courts, ensuring they are open when the most passengers are present.

7. Demand forecasting & capacity planning

Unlike property-specific models, this "big picture" data product forecasts future demand across entire networks or cruise itineraries to optimize fleet deployment.

• Recommended uses: Route profitability forecasting, fleet assignment (matching aircraft size to demand), and informing long-term strategic facility investments.

• Target personas:

  • Network Planners: Allocate aircraft or cruise ships to the most profitable routes based on 6-to-12-month demand forecasts.

  • Finance Teams: Use the data to forecast quarterly revenue and plan for major resource needs like fuel hedging or new aircraft acquisitions.

  • Executives: Monitor overall network utilization and load factors to make high-level decisions on market expansion or exits.

Roadmap: Building your first hospitality data product

A data product is more than a dataset—it’s a complete package of curated data tied to specific outcomes, documented questions, clear ownership, and embedded quality signals.

The “report-to-product” approach

To avoid early-stage paralysis, Alation recommends a pragmatic "report-to-product" methodology. By working backwards from an existing, business-critical report, you sidestep theoretical debates and deliver value quickly.

1. Choose a business-critical report: Identify a dashboard (like sales pipeline or churn) that stakeholders already rely on.

2. Frame with business questions: Define exactly what the product answers (e.g., "What is the forecast accuracy by region?").

3. Curate with purpose: Document only the fields necessary to answer those questions. This targeted curation increases engagement by showing stewards exactly how their work enables business outcomes.

4. Publish to the Marketplace: Package the product with ownership details and quality indicators in Alation’s Data Products Marketplace to make it discoverable and reusable.

5. Iterate deliberately: Treat the product as an MVP. Monitor usage and adoption, expanding only when justified by business demand.

Measuring the impact of your hospitality data product

Organizations can measure the success of their data products through four key lenses:

• Adoption: Active users and the frequency of queries answered via chat.

• Trust: Percentage of products with defined owners, SLAs, and data contracts.

• Efficiency: Reduction in time-to-insight and the decrease in duplicate datasets.

• Business Impact: Measurable gains such as increased pipeline conversion or reduced customer churn.

As AI becomes central to your strategy, maintaining control over your data is vital. Alation provides a neutral Agentic Knowledge Layer that spans Snowflake, Databricks, Microsoft, and more. This adaptability safeguards your data sovereignty, ensuring you aren't locked into a single vendor and can innovate on your own terms.

Conclusion: Ready for takeoff

The traditional approach of managing raw, scattered data is no longer sufficient for the speed of modern travel. Data products represent a fundamental shift—moving data from a passive byproduct of systems to a high-value, purposeful asset.

By embracing a data product operating model, supported by a platform like Alation, travel and hospitality organizations can create a structured, scalable, and outcome-driven data ecosystem. This is the only way to build the Knowledge Layer required to power the next generation of trusted, agentic AI.

Ready to start your journey?

Download our Data Products Blueprint Whitepaper to discover the step-by-step framework for building a successful data product marketplace in your organization.