Detailed information about customers’ personal preferences has become an essential tool for businesses of all types, enabling those businesses to tailor their marketing efforts and other promotional activities to targeted clientele. This is especially true in the hotel industry, where individual hotels and hotel brands attempt to capitalize on the vast data accumulated from their guests during a hotel stay. Detailed guest information—room type preferences, food and beverage tastes, credit card information—is routinely captured by hotel owners and managers, providing them with very specific and detailed information about each of their guests. In the increasingly competitive hotel market, this information enables hotel operators to tailor marketing and guest service experience, allowing them both to anticipate guest needs and to target particular guests with their marketing and sales strategies.1
Given the importance of this data, a significant issue universally arises when a hotel transitions to new management, whether by sale, as a result of a termination of the previous hotel management agreement or otherwise. Hotel owners and operators are keenly aware of the value of this information—which frequently leads to clashes over ownership and control over such data. While hotel owners are the owners of the real estate and the entirety of the hotel business, hotel operators have a contractual obligation to manage the owner’s property during the term of the management or agreement and typically bring their valuable reservation systems, client roster, intellectual property and sales expertise to the owner’s business.
