Data That Drives Results

Editor’s Note: “In our June issue highlighting Top Resort Companies and Top Performers, one theme keeps surfacing: the best operators aren’t chasing more data—they’re designing better data. This article explores what separates high-performing organizations from the rest.”

When most people hear “data” they picture storage. Servers. The cloud. The headlines about data centers consuming water and straining power grids. Data as infrastructure. Data as cost. Data as something valuable and delicate — requiring you to collect as much as possible while carefully avoiding the privacy laws that complicate the collecting.

That’s not what this article is about.

This is about what data does when it’s designed to move — from the experience that captures it, through the systems that connect it, into the decisions it makes possible. The question a quiz asks that becomes a campaign. The application that surfaces a candidate worth calling. The connection between your highest-rated week and what was actually happening on property — not just what comment cards said, but what guests posted, tagged, reviewed and shared across social media, forums and review sites in that same window.

Data designed to move where it matters isn’t about how much you store. It’s about what you build to receive it — and what becomes possible when it all connects.

Signals Amongst Noise

Finding the right employee and finding the right customer are the same challenge with different job titles attached. Both require putting an offer — employment or purchase — in front of people, earning their attention and converting that attention into action. The channels differ. The goal doesn’t.

As reporting tools became standard across marketing and HR platforms, visibility into numbers that never existed before came with them. Impressions. Applications started. Form completions. Click-throughs. Lead volume. These numbers are real and at the top of the funnel they matter — but they don’t tell you whether the right person is in that pool. Somewhere in the process of watching those numbers, many organizations started optimizing for them rather than for the outcome they were supposed to predict.

A high application count doesn’t make the right candidate easier to find. It makes them harder. The probability of a strong match rising to the top shrinks as the pile grows. A lead volume spike doesn’t mean more tours closing. It means more time vetting. When top-of-funnel data lives disconnected from what happens downstream — no line drawn between who applied and who got hired, between who submitted a form and who bought — volume becomes a vanity metric dressed up as progress.

Signal is something different. Signal is what comes back when the experience someone has before they apply or inquire is designed to attract the right person rather than the most people. It’s the candidate who completes an application because it spoke to them, not because a bot submitted it. It’s the lead who answers five qualifying questions because the experience gave them a reason to. Signal is earned — by the experience that preceded the response.

Before They Ever Apply

Hospitality has one of the highest employee turnover rates of any industry — hovering around 70 to 80% annually, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For vacation ownership properties where staff continuity directly affects owner satisfaction, the cost of that churn is measured in more than recruiting hours. Cornell research puts the cost of a single hospitality departure at $9,932. Multiply that across a season.

The instinct is to cast a wider net. Post more jobs, on more boards, to more people. But volume isn’t the problem recruiting is trying to solve. Match quality is. And the wider the net, the less probable the match becomes.

Greenhouse, one of the largest hiring platforms in the country, tracked 300 million applications in a single year — roughly 200 for every role filled. The company’s CEO has called it an AI doom loop: candidates using automated tools to apply everywhere at once, companies using automated screening to manage the flood, and somewhere in the middle, the genuinely right person struggling to be found. The most optimized application isn’t necessarily the best fit. It’s just the one that was built to move through the system.

The properties that don’t face this problem aren’t just lucky. They’re known.

A company with a strong reputation — in its market, in its industry, among the people most likely to thrive in its environment — attracts candidates who seek it out rather than stumble across it. Netflix receives an average of 84 applicants per LinkedIn job posting per day, according to a Resume.io analysis of LinkedIn data. Restaurant chains with poor reputations for culture and compensation receive fewer than one. The gap isn’t the job board. It’s what people know about the company before they ever click apply.

Brand visibility built for customers works for candidates too. A resort that appears consistently in trade publications — like Resort Trades — that has a voice in its industry, that is known by name among hospitality professionals — that property is more likely to attract a candidate who chose hospitality, and chose that company specifically. Marketing investment and recruiting outcomes aren’t always tracked together. They influence each other more than most organizations account for.

But visibility gets people to the door. The application experience determines who walks through it.

The iCIMS 2025 State of Frontline Hiring Report, which surveyed 1,000 frontline workers and 1,000 hiring managers, found that 68% of candidates abandon hospitality job applications — the highest abandonment rate of any frontline sector. Half of those who quit said the application was too long or time-consuming. The average application, according to an Appcast audit, requires 51 clicks from start to finish.

The candidates with options — the ones a hospitality property actually wants — don’t finish that application. They move on.

Shorter, smarter application experiences change what comes back. When data is designed to move where it matters, it can inform the questions being asked before a candidate ever types a word — surfacing what a direct supervisor values most in that role, or asking something meaningful that matches what you already know the right person for this position is looking for. A candidate who moves through a well-designed step-by-step experience — one question at a time, built for mobile, asking what a resume can’t answer — is already telling you something about their fit and their commitment that a stack of AI-polished PDFs cannot.
This is what it looks like to design the front of the funnel for signal rather than volume — fewer, better candidates who showed up because the experience was worth completing.

Data You Were Given

Not captured. Not collected. Not tracked. Given — information someone chose to share because the experience made sharing worthwhile.

Most lead capture in hospitality starts and ends with a transaction. A landing page offers 20% off a mini vacation. Someone enters an email address to claim it. The exchange is complete and what the organization walks away with is a name, an address and almost no indication of whether that person has any real interest in ownership — or whether they were simply motivated by a discount they’ll never act on. That’s first-party data: the information you collect almost by default through confirmations, bookings and contact forms. Useful for reaching people. Not particularly useful for understanding them.

Zero-party data is something different. It’s what someone chose to tell you — not because a system logged it, but because the experience made the reason clear. A prospective owner who answers five questions about how their family vacations, what flexibility means to them and what they’ve found frustrating about travel elsewhere isn’t filling out a form. They’re being heard. And if you look closely at those answers, you’re holding two things at once — a portrait of intent and a map of opportunity. What people say they’ve found frustrating elsewhere is a signal of what they’ll notice and value when you get it right.

The experience that produces this kind of data doesn’t require a complex technical build. It looks like a landing page with messaging built for a specific audience. It looks like a quiz that helps someone discover whether ownership fits their lifestyle. It looks like a visual questionnaire — activity tiles, preference selections, trip length choices — that asks a few targeted questions and gives something useful back. A personalized recommendation. A relevant next step. An experience that feels tailored rather than automated.

That sequencing matters across the entire marketing funnel. Audience targeting shapes who sees the message. Ad creative that matches that audience’s language and priorities earns the click. A landing page that continues that conversation — rather than resetting to a generic offer — keeps the momentum. And a lead capture experience that gives before it asks closes the loop. Each step either reinforces intent or loses it. When all four are aligned, what comes through isn’t volume. It’s signal.

Those partnerships do something a discount can’t. An offer built around a local winery dinner or a guided fishing excursion is rooted in enhanced value, not reduced price. A 20% discount lowers what the product is worth. A curated experience raises it. One trains your audience to wait for a deal. The other gives them a reason to act now.

Tools like SparkToro illustrate how this thinking has evolved. Where audience research once meant inputting a single website URL and receiving a standardized output, it now accepts a natural language description of who you’re trying to reach — behaviors, interests, job titles, context — and returns something far more nuanced. That shift reflects exactly what data designed to move where it matters produces: not a data point, but a description. Not a field, but a portrait. The richer the input, the more useful the output.

Research from Interact, drawn from more than 100 million leads generated on its platform, found that interactive experiences convert at more than 40% — compared to 2 to 5% for static forms receiving the same traffic. That gap isn’t about design. It’s about what the experience gives before it asks. The pattern holds in practice — agency clients testing interactive lead experiences have seen not only higher conversion rates but more actionable data coming through on the other side.

Given, not taken.

Capture Less, Know More

The organizations getting the most out of AI right now are not the ones with the most data. They are the ones with clean, organized, compliant data — structured with intention and connected to the outcomes that actually matter.

IBM’s research on AI adoption found that 68% of organizations it calls “AI-first” have mature data governance frameworks in place. Among everyone else, that number drops to 32%. The gap isn’t in the tools they’re using or the models they’ve deployed. It’s in what they fed those systems before they ever turned them on.

Most organizations have more data than they know what to do with. Research from Splunk found that 55 to 60% of enterprise data is never used — sitting in systems, reports and exports that nobody looks at. One third of organizations say 75% or more of their data has never been acted on. In hospitality specifically, a 2025 survey by Access Hospitality found that 60% of businesses describe their data as incomplete or unreliable and managers lose an average of 360 hours per year switching between disconnected systems that don’t talk to each other.

That’s not a technology problem. It’s a design problem.

When data collection happens without intention — when the goal is to capture everything rather than capture what’s useful — the result is volume without clarity. Reports get built on top of metrics that were never connected to outcomes. Decisions get made on numbers that look meaningful but don’t trace back to the thing that actually matters. A high applicant count. A strong impression total. A full lead list. None of those numbers answers the question that drives the business forward.

If your data cannot clearly answer what happened after the form was submitted, the application was started or the tour was booked, you are reporting on the top of the funnel while your bottom-line outcomes remain a separate, unconnected conversation. The technology to connect those threads exists. Marketing data tied to sales data tied to operations data — a clear line from first touchpoint to closed deal, filled role or completed stay. If those connections don’t exist in your organization today, building them is not a future priority. It is the current gap between the decisions you’re making and the decisions you could be making.

The tools that make this possible are no longer out of reach. No-code and low-code platforms, automation tools and an expanding ecosystem of integrations have made data designed to move where it matters accessible to independent resorts, mid-sized management groups and large-scale enterprise operators alike. The architecture looks different at each scale. The principle doesn’t.

AI accelerates whatever foundation it’s given. Feed it disconnected, unstructured, high-volume data and it produces disconnected, unstructured, high-volume output. Feed it clean, intentional, outcome-connected data and it can segment, personalize, predict and prioritize in ways that move real results. The structured input doesn’t have to be massive. It has to be right.

Design for how people actually behave, not how you wish they would — and what comes back will be worth acting on.

The Signal You Earn

Every funnel in your organization ends at the same place — a person deciding whether to go further. Whether that person is considering a role on your team or a week at your resort, the experience that preceded that decision shaped it.

The data you collect, the applications you receive and the leads you generate are a reflection of the experiences you built to produce them. Design those experiences with intention — for the person on the other side, not the system collecting the response — and what comes back changes.

Bad experiences produce noise. Good ones produce signal. And signal, unlike volume, is worth acting on.

Kelley Ellert is the founder of Waterwheel Marketing, helping hospitality organizations build marketing that connects — from the first impression to the final conversion, with the reporting to know what worked. Find her at waterwheelmarketing.com or on LinkedIn.