Hoteliers like you today, with intense competition, depending on the guest service aspect to stay competitive. There is an opportunity by which hotels can achieve growth by competitive benchmarking.
While you gain a competitive advantage, better guest service benefits you. You will need to keep an eye on your competitors and consider what they are doing in terms of attracting tourists and selling more rooms.
And this can only happen if you come up with suitable competition benchmarking metrics, which also support you with skilled revenue management.
Benchmarking is the measurement of one company’s achievements by comparing to a standard.
The best in class or the competitive set. It is used to understand the gaps in the organization’s processes to gain a competitive advantage.
To foresee their current and future plans, analyzing the competition is important.
It also allows you to understand where you are relative to them.
What are the ways where you rank above them and where they have an advantage over you in all respects?
You will make improvements in your approach and tactics to stay ahead of them until you succeed in this.
While competition benchmarking helps to develop the business as a concept. The hotel industry seems to be a bit slow to find its real value.
Because it is found only 10% to 11% of hoteliers hold a close eye on their contests. By seeing this data it seems they are not understanding the importance of competitive analysis.
Keep track of the online credibility of your hotel on different review sites and hotel booking portals.
See what the visitors think about them. Compare the same thing to the kind of reviews you have got.
When visitors have positive things to say about the food or some other facilities if you find yourself lagging in those places, try to make improvements.
Know that guest reviews are an excellent source for helping you appreciate the success of your competition.
Its primary objective is to provide you with a good picture of what you are up against.
In other words, the study of competition is all about evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the competing hotels.
Obviously, to win against them, you MUST KNOW your rivals entirely. As a renowned phrase goes-
“A horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace”.
Now with our understanding of how this works, let’s go a little further.
Category of the hotel, location, pricing, guest profile, and amenities
Try to find hotels that fit your star rating, room rate, food price, and other amenities in the vicinity.
As discussed above, you can build a list of hotels with up to 70 rooms if you manage a 50-room property in Paris. Also, compare your room rates.
You should also look at hotels that sell rooms for $80 to $100 a night if you sell rooms for $70 a night, as your average target guests are not going to choose a $150 hotel per night, nor are they considering booking a hotel for $40 a night.
Once you are ready with your list, it’s now time to get to the task – tracking their performance. Here are some ways to do that –
Room rate is the most critical factor that influences a guest’s booking decision. Visit your competitors’ websites, look at their rates.
Understand what discounts/benefits they offer on direct bookings. Look at their rates published on OTAs.
All these will give you an idea of how to price your rooms competitively, to attract more guests.
See if they get to drive more direct bookings via their websites. If they have an edge over you in this, work on your website and integrate a booking engine to get more direct bookings.
Find out their OTA and metasearch strategy. If they are doing it better than you, analyze all the channels they are connected to. If you get to know their top 3 performing hotel distribution platforms, then you must list your property on them, if you haven’t already.
Keep track of the online credibility of your hotel on different review sites and hotel booking portals. See what the visitors think about them.
Compare the same thing to the kind of reviews you have got. When visitors have positive things to say about the food or some other facilities.
If you find yourself lagging in those places, try to make improvements.
Know that guest reviews are an excellent source for helping you appreciate the success of your competition.
For this, you need to sign-up for their emails. It will help you understand how they communicate with their guests while launching new amenities.
You will also get to know what special steps they take to inform and attract guests during local festivals.
Take for example the LA County Fair. If you can lay your hands on one of their emails specially designed to appeal to the crowd during the LA County Fair.
It will give you a lot of insight into their marketing and promotion strategy. Overall, this exercise will help you understand their mailing frequency and guest engagement tactics.
Like in any other business, technology is considered a key enabler in the hotel industry, too.
If your competitors are ahead of you in terms of ease and profitability of the business, chances are that they are using some of the new-age hospitality technology solutions.
For example, if you are still stuck with an on-premise Hotel PMS, you are bound to face operational bottlenecks.
And if you find out that your competitors are using cloud Hotel PMS, you must change your approach as soon as possible.
Since your ability to streamline processes is limited by an on-premise PMS.
It also does not allow you to work with a host of other third-party solutions to make more out of today’s online hotel bookings, such as channel manager and booking engine, etc.
Based on the above discussion, it can be concluded that hotels can achieve growth by competitive benchmarking.
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