Your hotel sales strategy is an evolving plan that requires you to stay on top of what’s going on in your market and other markets that are considered alternatives. Are you booking at or above the pace of your competitors? What types of meetings are booked, and is your property getting its share of the business?
Access to these and other key pieces of data makes it possible to find new accounts and adapt your proposals to meet the needs of specific industries and group sizes.
Hotel Market Data as Part of the Selling Process Increases Productivity
It’s easy to focus on your property and examine your hotel’s trends to compare quarters or this year to last year. But could you book more groups if you have insight into what’s happening in the market? By using market trend data, you can set goals for your team that push them to reach the level of performance that matches or exceeds your competition. Some of these KPIs are:
- Group event booking pace — Is it going up or down? If the hotel market data shows that the pace is trending upward, is your property’s booking pace also going up? If there’s a downward trend, should you look at other industries or pull in groups that usually go to other markets?
- Average meeting size — This includes both meeting space and number of attendees. If the hotel market data shows that larger groups are booking in your area, but you haven’t seen that, it’s time to look into how to attract these groups to your property.
Related Read: The Data-Driven Hotel Sales Team
Market Data Analysis Allows You to Increase Hotel Revenue
Growing revenue can come in a few different formats, including finding new groups to host and identifying larger groups that can fill your property for more time throughout the year.
By evaluating the industries booking meeting space in your market, you can identify new areas for growth. You may be surprised to find that an industry frequents your market you haven’t worked with before. It’s time to start reaching out to them!
Market data also makes it possible to focus on the groups that will bring in more revenue. If you have the capacity, focus on groups that can fill much of your room inventory or groups that are interested in longer events based on their past booking behavior.
Streamlining Sales Efforts Using Hotel Market Data
As you know, there’s not much time available in a hotel sales team’s day to prospect new business, especially with today’s smaller sales teams. You need to be able to quickly evaluate what’s happening and adjust your hotel sales strategy to match.
Responding to RFPs is a huge part of every day, but you can’t lose sight of finding opportunities that are a good fit for your property. Using hotel market data and monitoring the trends will give you a sense of where you may have the most success with your limited prospecting time. Make it worth your effort!
You can also point out ways your property can help them have the best meeting ever. Learn how to implement hot meeting trends and make your venue stand out!
Stay on Top of What’s Changing With Your Competition Using Hotel Market Data
You can identify opportunities to shift market share by analyzing trends and comp set data. More than likely, you’re tracking the activity of your hotel’s comp set in the same market.
- What are these key competitors booking, and, more importantly, which meetings are they NOT booking?
- Is there a property in your market that you should start to watch more closely because their sales are taking off?
- Is there a property in your comp set that traditionally hosted a specific group that has shifted away?
Take the action to reach out to groups that previously booked with your competition but moved to a new market recently. Find industries that are interested in your region and talk to them, too.
More than likely, you also have a comp set in other markets that you can either pull from or who pulls from your business. Do you know if their business is trending up or down? Which groups are booking in these other markets that may have been booking your area previously?
The Importance of Market Segmentation Data
Understanding and leveraging market segmentation is crucial for hotels to identify opportunities within their competitive landscape. By analyzing market segments and industries, hotels can pinpoint where there is potential to increase market share. They can assess how their property compares to competitors within these segments and industries to determine areas of strength and weakness. Accordingly, a data-driven strategic plan can be developed to enhance the hotel’s market share based on this analysis.
Let’s consider an example scenario. Nic wants to boost his hotel’s corporate business share, but he’s unsure where to start. By examining actualized booking data from 2023 and 2024 among his competitors, he finds that the Technology industry is the key sector in the corporate segment, and his main competitor is dominating it. Nic identifies the top 10 accounts and sets a target to secure at least three of them by 2025.
While all of this competitive data is interesting, how do you turn it into revenue?
To effectively grow your property’s revenue, you’ll need to understand, using hotel market data, what competitors are booking – in your market and in other hotel markets. Then, focus on the group’s needs for meeting space, hotel rooms, and even unique event opportunities that can help you win the business from your competition.
How to Be Sure You Have the Most Up-to-Date Group Booking Data
There are few places where you can access up-to-date information about which groups hold events in various hotels. Knowland makes this information available so you can truly see how your property compares to others in your comp set, in your entire hotel market, and in other markets from where you may be able to pull business.
You need to be able to:
- Gauge overall market performance and identify the average number of bookings per property, estimated attendees, and average square footage used per event. Then, review performance over time with customizable date ranges.
- Drill into market segmentation to review the business mix and highlight the industries driving business in your market. Then, uncover the active accounts with a simple click.
- Analyze meeting space trends to make data-driven space utilization decisions. Connect guest room inventory to meeting size and better understand if smaller or larger properties are becoming competitors.
The tools you need to be a more efficient and strategic hotel sales team are available through Knowland. Talk to our team to see how this tool can work to increase your property’s sales and revenue.
[Originally published November 2022. Updated April 2024]
