From using math to beat the casinos in Las Vegas at Black Jack, which gave rise to a book (Bringing Down the House) and a film (21), Jeff Ma is now bringing his personal experience of implementing data strategy to the hotel space.

The recently appointed senior vice president of products and analytics at Duetto sees big opportunities for the hospitality industry to make “data-informed” decisions.

Ma says the industry needs to embrace failure. He believes that cognitive biases, such as omission bias and reliance on gut feeling, are leading revenue specialists to make the wrong decision - or worse, no decision.

In a very entertaining Tech Talk at The Phocuswright Conference, he laid out some of the areas where more reliance on data and less on human behavior would lead to better outcomes.

In short, the devil is in the data, and there are huge opportunities for those that can harness it.