Driving the Data Strategy at Macdonald Hotels & Resorts

Macdonald Hotels & Resorts is one of the UK’s leading hospitality groups, operating a diverse portfolio of properties and a complex ecosystem of property management, reservations, leisure, finance, and marketing systems.

As the business evolved, its technology landscape became increasingly fragmented, limiting the organisation’s ability to derive consistent, actionable insight from its data.

Macdonald Hotels faced a fragmented data environment, with data distributed across multiple systems and inconsistent governance practices. This created several key challenges:

• Limited visibility of guest behaviour and revenue performance
• Manual and time-intensive reporting processes, often reliant on spreadsheets
• Inconsistent data quality and absence of a single source of truth
• Difficulty using data to inform pricing, marketing, and operational decisions
• Missed opportunities to improve direct bookings and personalise guest engagement
The organisation required a clear, structured data strategy to improve governance, simplify its architecture, and unlock real-time insight across the business.

Leading Resolutions partnered with Macdonald Hotels to deliver a pragmatic, business-aligned data strategy and architecture review.
The engagement focused on:

• Understanding the current data landscape through stakeholder engagement and structured assessment
• Identifying gaps in governance, processes, and technology
• Defining a scalable target-state data architecture
• Establishing a clear governance framework with defined ownership and standards
• Developing a business case and prioritised roadmap for implementation
The approach ensured alignment to business priorities while maintaining a focus on actionable, deliverable outcomes.

The engagement provided Macdonald Hotels with a clear and actionable foundation for becoming a data-driven organisation:

• Improved visibility across guest, operational, and financial data
• Reduced reliance on manual reporting and associated inefficiencies
• Greater confidence in data to support decision-making
• Enhanced ability to drive direct bookings and optimise commercial performance
• Defined pathway to scalable data capabilities and future innovation

By establishing a structured data strategy and governance model, Macdonald Hotels is now positioned to unlock greater value from its data, improving operational efficiency, enhancing guest experience, and supporting sustainable revenue growth.