Benchmarking hotels in your portfolio against each other, competitors and the market helps you determine how well your properties are performing. So, what should comparing properties look like today, why you should care, and what challenges do you need to navigate amidst today’s fast-shifting market conditions?
What Is Hotel Benchmarking and Why Is It Important?
Hotel benchmarking helps you quantitatively evaluate a property’s performance against its competitors and the industry’s top players. It shows you how the hotel ranks against its comp set and in its market, how its current performance compares with the past, and if its metrics are improving.
You may think your hotel had a great month, but others might have done even better! Hotel benchmarking provides the contextual information you need to develop an unbiased view of where your portfolio stands and how you can improve its performance going forward.
Comparing performance gives you an objective perspective on the latest industry trends. It takes the guesswork out of your planning and helps you answer critical questions about the market and your competitors using key performance indicators (KPIs).
The insights can help you fine-tune your sales, operational, and pricing strategies while identifying new opportunities to pursue. The ongoing improvements can help you optimize the ROI of your portfolio properties, gain market share, and improve sales productivity.
Key Steps to Effective Group Performance Benchmarking
Here’s how to set a solid foundation for comparing hotel group business comparisons:
- Understand the market: Know your market’s pace and identify trends impacting your group business to focus your benchmarking efforts on the right metrics.
- Identify your competitors: Perform a competitive analysis to determine which hotels to measure your properties against. They should be comparable in room inventory, chain scale and class, property type, amenities, target audience, etc.
- Drill down into the data: Be specific about the details of the metrics to identify market trends, customer demands, and top accounts.
- Compare current data with past metrics: Understand the context to see growth patterns, recognize trends, and identify new sales opportunities.
- Design a roadmap: Using the insight from benchmarking, create a roadmap to guide the growth strategy for your portfolio, such as where to allocate your sales resources.
- Measure performance: Evaluate results regularly to verify you’re heading in the right direction. Also, identify the top and bottom performers to replicate the success and implement remediation programs.
How to Navigate Today’s Benchmarking Challenges
While group business is coming back, the markets have changed significantly post-pandemic. You can’t simply compare 2019’s data with current metrics to assess performance accurately.
Additionally, hotel asset managers must tackle the minutia of collating data from various systems used by different properties. The information often comes in formats incompatible with each other, so you have to spend hours logging onto multiple systems, copy-and-pasting the information onto spreadsheets, and normalizing the data.
To act on market trends that will impact your sales strategy and portfolio performance, you must have access to the most current data on all properties, their comp sets, and markets. Then, you need a dashboard that displays the insights on one screen for a bird’s-eye view of the market to quickly compare performance and make accurate and timely decisions.
The good news is you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Knowland’s new tool, Portfolio Capture, is designed to help hoteliers manage a portfolio of assets efficiently and effectively. You can benchmark all your properties against each other to identify top and bottom performers when it comes to capturing group business.
Using Knowland’s extensive database, Portfolio Capture shows you how each hotel’s comp set performs and where the opportunities lie. You can also see standardized KPIs from every asset to measure performance and use the insights to capture percentages, rank in the market, and improve operating efficiency.
Learn more and see how you can have these priceless insights at your fingertips.
