By Corina Violette, Director of Inventory Management, Global Connections, Inc.
Every operator I talk to these days has more data than they know what to do with. Survey responses, call transcripts, review platforms, scorecards, feedback forms — the volume isn’t the problem anymore. Almost every resort and sales team I know has a dashboard, or three, telling them what happened last week.
What most of us are still missing isn’t data. It’s the story underneath it.
Dashboards tell you what. They rarely tell you why — or who.
A dashboard can show you that a resort’s overall scores dipped after a slow renovation quarter, or that complaints ticked up in a given week. What it usually can’t do on its own is connect that dip to the three front-desk comments about wait times, or notice that one sales rep’s numbers have quietly outpaced the team for eight straight weeks and nobody’s said a word to her about it.
As a director of inventory management, this isn’t an abstract exercise for me. Reservation issues and resort-quality complaints affect our members directly, and I need them surfaced fast — not buried in a report I get to three weeks later. A member who had a rough check-in, a unit that wasn’t ready, a reservation that didn’t match what was promised — those things compound if they sit unnoticed. The gap between a complaint happening and someone on my team seeing it is, in a very real sense, the gap between a member who feels heard and one who doesn’t.
That’s the piece that gets lost. We build dashboards to catch problems, and they’re good at that. But the same data set that surfaces a complaint pattern also holds the evidence to recognize your best people — and that side gets used far less often. Recognition shouldn’t depend on a manager happening to notice. It should be something the data hands you, the same way a red flag gets handed to you.
The operators who get real value out of their data aren’t the ones with the prettiest chart. They’re the ones who’ve built a habit of asking two questions of every report: what needs fixing, and who deserves credit — and then actually acting on both.
AI is everywhere right now. Most of it isn’t pointed at anything useful.
It feels like every vendor conversation this year opens with an AI feature. Some of it is genuinely good. A lot of it is built for a demo, not a Tuesday. Tools that summarize things nobody reads, flag things nobody acts on, or automate a step that was already fast enough. The industry is spending enormous energy on AI applications that look impressive in a pitch and then quietly go unused three months in.
The version of AI that’s actually worth your attention is the boring one: pointed at the pile of data you already have, doing the reading you don’t have time to do, and handing you the pattern instead of the raw feed. Something that reads two thousand comments overnight and tells you which three issues are actually driving how members feel about a stay, which member of your team keeps getting singled out by name in a good way, and where a small operational fix would move the needle before it becomes a trend line you have to explain in a QBR.
The tools that will matter in this industry aren’t the ones with the most AI in the marketing copy. They’re the ones that shorten the distance between something happened and someone knew what to do about it.
The real shift: planning ahead instead of reacting
As a director managing inventory, I don’t have the luxury of a two-week deep dive every time something shifts. Decisions get made in real time, often the same day a number moves. That only works if the story behind the number is already surfaced — not sitting in a spreadsheet waiting for someone to notice it during month-end review.
That’s the actual promise of applying AI well: not novelty, not automation for its own sake, but compressing the time between data landing and a decision getting made. Reactionary management happens when the story takes three weeks to find. Proactive management happens when the story is already sitting on top of the data the moment you open the dashboard.
You already have the data. Most of us do. The differentiator going forward isn’t going to be who collects the most of it — it’s going to be who gets to the deeper story fastest, and who remembers that the same data telling you what went wrong is also telling you who to thank. What next? Do you build your own and leverage AI or partner with a company who already has something in place?
Corina Violette is Director of Inventory Management at Global Connections, Inc., where she leads inventory strategy and operational excellence supporting more than 200,000 members. With over 17 years of experience in the vacation ownership industry, she specializes in optimizing inventory, driving cross-functional initiatives, and leveraging AI, automation, and business intelligence to advance operational performance and strategic decision-making.
