Competitive Benchmarking is a practice which shows where you stand in front of your competitors.
The hotel industry is one of the most competitive industries and the competition will increase with the growing number of hotels.
Although the success of a hotel business largely depends on customer satisfaction, service improvements, and providing value for money, not keeping an eye on the competitors can be harmful.
Ergo the significance of competitive benchmarking is rising with exponential rates.
Benchmarking will allow you to analyze where you stand. In what fields you are ahead and where you need to improve.
So let us discuss how we can improve our hotel business with competitive benchmarking.
The first step is to identify the competition. You will have to jot down the option your customers have apart from you. And for that, you will have to think from the customers perspective.
This way you will be able to decide who is your competition. Once you have decided that who are your competitors then you will be able to work on your improvement.
The competition can be analyzed on the basis of location, rates, facilities, and size.
Basically, you will have to analyze which hotel is targetting the same consumer group which you are targetting. So if you are an upscale hotel then budget hotels are not your competition.
By this way, you will have to make a list of not more than 5 to 7 hotels. Lesser than 5 will give you insufficient data and more than 7 will create information pollution for you.
Once you have made a list of your competitors the next step is to collect the data. The data can be based on different standards. Let us discuss them one by one.
You will have to monitor the room types of your competitors, what services they are offering, and especially at what price. This way you will be able to understand where you are lagging behind. and what should be done?
Again the aim here should be to compare your room types and service and your competitors from the perception of the consumer.
You ill have to understand that if you are a consumer than in what price ranges what options are available to you. And the try to think, are you providing the best value for money?
When you will gather and analyze the room types, services, and price data then you will also get insight into the customer groups your competitors are targetting.
There is a chance that you can miss a consumer group in your marketing campaigns. So when you analyze the consumer group targetted by your competitors then it is for sure you will get something new out of it.
Then you can also target these customer groups to get more business.
A newsletter contains special offers, news related to the hotel like any new service, and call to action. They are a great source to gather information.
Ergo, it is very important to subscribe to the newsletter of your competitors.
Go through their every email to see how they are driving more bookings to their hotel. What is their elixir to grow business?
Examine their call to action and then make a strategy for your hotel.
The other method of gathering competitors data is to follow them on social media. Here also you will have to see how they are using the social media platforms to get the influx of bookings. And also their call to action.
You can also analyze the content they are publishing to drive more traffic on their website. Then you have to compare it to the content you are publishing. This way you will get to understand where are you lacking in terms of social media marketing.
Running a hotel business is not easy, especially without the help of technology. We lag behind our competitors if we do not use the right tools needed.
For example, if you have listed your property on a various platform then you will need a channel manager. Without the channel manager, how will you manage your inventories on these many platforms? I a booking come from a perticular OTA then will you update it on all the OTAs manually?
It will take a lot of time and will have a tendency for human error.
Then you must also have a booking engine if want to increase the influx of direct bookings. So do not hesitate to embrace the technology if you want to be ahead of your competitors.
Nothing can beat you if you have the best in market services. If you are giving the right value for money then you will be the first choice of the guests.
Try to understand your guests what are their needs and what can be done to fulfill them. If there is an issue then be quick to resolve them.
Keep in my mind a loyal customer is the best source of marketing. If your customer liked your services they talk about you and refer you to others hence generating more bookings.
While planning for a trip search engines are the place where most of the travelers go. So to beat your competitor you must be above in the search engine results than your competition.
Through competitive benchmarking, you will have to analyze what keywords your competitors are using. Then you will have to try to rank on those keywords above than your competitors.
So you should run a proper and effective SEO campaign.
We aspire to serve the hotel industry with our product QloApps and that process we have taken a step forward by launching the QloApps Forum. So please raise any of your issue on our Forum.
For any kind of technical assistance, just raise a ticket.
