Data Analytics Platforms: Value Propositions and Adoption Challenges for Small Hospitality Businesses

Managers increasingly seek ways to explore insights from data for business improvements and innovation. Data Analytics (DA) platforms hold promise for businesses, especially small businesses that cannot afford tailor-made proprietary analytics services. DA platforms offer generic analytics features to a pool of businesses, saving costs and enabling benchmarking. This paper explores value propositions and adoption challenges for small businesses regarding DA. The paper offers practical insights from designing and launching a DA platform targeting small businesses in the hospitality sector. The findings of our paper show that data analytics is potentially valuable for small businesses through insights into market and customer trends. Small businesses can leverage such insights to refine their offerings. Trust and privacy concerns in sharing data are key challenges holding back adoption. We proposed measures, especially privacy-preserving technologies, to mitigate the risk of tracing a specific enterprise's data shared on the DA platform. These measures assure businesses that data shared or analyzed through the DA platform is not used to harm their competitive advantage.