It’s well known that data analysis tools have made important steps ahead in the last few years both in terms of performance and usability. At the same time, notions like analytics, big data or data mining have been more and more familiar, out of a small circle of experts, for a wide range of people.

Huge opportunities may arise in the travel and tourism market from this technological progress.

However, despite the ease of access to the technical knowledge, it’s still quite difficult for a typical Italian small or medium-size company to focus on which of these technologies can be useful to increase its commercial or financial goals and how.

In this presentation we would like to give an example of how to seize this opportunities. In particular, our purpose is to describe how a typical reservation system of an hotel can be integrated in a business intelligence system to create a KPI monitoring system, to forecast the occupancy rate or implement an automatic management of room rates.