Why Data Quality Is Underrated - and Undermining Your Hotel CRM Strategy

Insights from HMA’s 2025 Data Quality Case Study

In the world of hospitality marketing, data is currency. But too often, hoteliers are working with counterfeit coins - CRMs packed with incomplete records, placeholders, and inconsistent formatting.

At HMA Intelligent Marketing, we recently conducted a full-scale audit of guest data for a hotel portfolio using a third-party CRM. The objective was straightforward: assess the health of their data and determine whether it could truly support modern segmentation and personalization strategies.

What we uncovered tells a broader story - one that affects far more hotels than you might think.

“It Has a Field, So It Must Have the Data” - Right?

One of the most surprising insights? Even when CRMs appear to be collecting key fields - like City or State - the content inside those fields is often unusable.

Take this example: when analyzing the City field for one property, we found that the top entry by volume wasn’t a real location. It was literally “No City.”

The issue wasn’t a lack of structure - it was a lack of integrity. A city field without actual city data leads to generic segmentation, skewed reporting, and ineffective geo-targeting.

This wasn’t an isolated problem. Our audit revealed:

• Over 68% of guest records had no stay history, blocking any attempt to build loyalty or frequency-based segments.

• No check-in or check-out dates - just vague metrics like total nights or total spend.

• 22.8% of all email addresses were OTA domains, dragging down inbox placement and engagement.

• Thousands of bad address records, with filler values like ".", "X", and “Please.”

• Malformed and placeholder emails like 1@2.com or sample@group, rendering entire segments unusable.

The Real Impact of Dirty Data

When your CRM is powered by flawed inputs, here’s what actually happens:

• Your segmentation can’t go deeper than state or region - because ZIPs and cities are either missing or inaccurate.

• Your “top markets” in reporting become meaningless, with non-locations like “No City” topping the list.

• Personalization fails, because you’re targeting test accounts, group blocks, or repeat entries.

• Deliverability tanks, especially with OTA emails corrupting sender reputation.

  
  

And worst of all: you often don’t see the problem until it’s too late - because your system is “working,” just not accurately.

What HMA Does Differently

At HMA, we start every strategy with one critical step: data validation.Our Intelligencia platform is built with automated cleansing and enrichment before anything hits your campaign workflow.

Unlike other CRMs that push data responsibility to the user, Intelligencia:

• Cleanses and structures every record pre-ingestion

• Suppresses OTA emails in real time

• Eliminates malformed or duplicate profiles

• Enables ZIP, DMA, loyalty, and behavioral segmentation

• Feeds reporting with geo-verified, behavior-linked data

  
  

The result? Actionable intelligence instead of questionable insights.

See the Case Study for Yourself

This audit exposed challenges we’ve seen time and again - and solved for clients across the industry. If your CRM says it can segment, ask yourself: what’s actually in those fields?

We’re happy to send you the full 2025 HMA Data Quality Case Study. Just contact us at sales@wearehma.com , and we’ll share the full breakdown of what we found, and how clean data can change the game.