OTA Insight:
Whether you’re a five-star luxury property, a boutique hotel, serviced apartment or even a B&B, everyone needs a revenue management strategy, and everyone needs to manage their pricing effectively to maximise their revenue opportunities.
This central truth underpins Rate Insight, the easy-to-use platform that gives users access to all of the relevant factors impacting demand for their property, whether it’s a hotel, apartment or aparthotel. Drawing data from Brand.com and OTAs, both on its users’ rates and those of their competitors, the app also provides information on events, parity and ranking. This gives property managers the information they need to make informed, strategic pricing decisions based on benchmarking and comparing against competitive sets and market demand factors.
Additionally, OTA Insight’s visually intuitive benchmarking tab gives the added benefit for properties to compare themselves against their competitors’ occupancy, ADR and RevPAR, sourced from our data partners, such as STR. But it’s not limited to one’s immediate compset: city-wide stats are available too, which is useful across the board, from large global chains to small independent boutique hotels.
From these simple-to-read graphs – and other features of Rate Insight – you can instantly spot where you can adjust your pricing strategy and where additional revenue opportunities may be.
When looking at the bigger performance management picture, this suite of curated data will help you understand your KPIs: are you above 100 per cent on your indexes of occupancy, ADR and RevPAR?
However, the best starting point is often simply looking at how you compare with your competitors’ rates, those defined by your compset, whether from Brand.com or the many OTAs and metasearch channels we monitor. By bringing parity analysis, events and ranking into the mix, you are on to a winner, both for benchmarking and your planning.
For more information, visit the OTA Insight website here.
STR Global:
Benchmarking serviced apartments:
Can you truly understand how well your property is performing without insights into the performance of your market and competition? If you’ve found yourself questioning how your occupancy compares to your competitors or how weekend performance compares to weekdays, benchmarking is the tool that can provide you with the answers.
Benchmarking enables you to compare and analyse your property’s performance in relation to your market and competitors, drawing on historical data to enable more informed and confident decision making. You may think you’ve had a great month or a great week but not realise that everyone else did much better than you – the power of benchmarking resides in the context it offers around your performance.
With a greater understanding of the bigger picture, you can strategise effectively, adjust pricing and tailor your marketing activity to resonate effectively with your audience. Benchmarking empowers you to identify your strengths and weaknesses as well as capitalise on opportunities.
Benchmarking and performance data for U.K. serviced apartments:
During Q1 2019, serviced apartments in the London market reported year-over-year occupancy growth of 1.7 per cent with demand growth (+4.2 per cent) in the English capital outpacing supply (+2.4 per cent). Manchester experienced occupancy growth of 1.6 per cent with healthy growth in both demand (+ six per cent) and supply (+4.4 per cent). However, in the Upper Upscale and Upscale classes, significant supply growth (+12.6 per cent) was stronger than a solid increase in demand (+8.3 per cent), driving occupancy down 3.8 per cent. Edinburgh saw flat occupancy (+0.1 per cent) because of almost identical growth rates in rooms sold (+6.2 per cent) and rooms available (+6.1 per cent).
For more information, visit the STR website here.
TravelClick Amadeus:
The past ten years have been remarkable for travel technology. Investment in the UK hotel market hit £7.4 billion in 2018, an unprecedented 29 per cent year-on-year rise, according to The Caterer.
While market conditions are generally expected to remain strong in 2019, PWC says that competition is fierce and slower growth is predicted.
In order to retain advantage, hoteliers need to fully harness the data available to them. Data is key to empower hotels to better know, acquire, convert and retain guests. This will enable hoteliers to stay one step ahead of competitors and make smarter, more informed decisions.
TravelClick’s Hotelligence360® is one of the most comprehensive business intelligence platforms in hospitality, featuring integrated historical and forward-looking data from hotels around the globe. It not only allows you to understand your competitors and empower your property to surpass them but also provides access to performance data for your hotel, competitive set, and local market across detailed customer segments and channels and creates a clear view of where your marketplace is today – and where it will be tomorrow.
Through our three key products – Demand360®, Rate360® and Agency 360® – we offer unique information for 25,000+ brands, small groups and independent hotels in 150+ countries and our customer base is continuing to expand. Recently GLH Hotels has partnered with TravelClick, encompassing many properties including the Thistle, Amba and Hardrock brands in London.
It is an exciting time to be in the travel technology business, but we all as an industry need to capitalise the data at hand in order to look forward and grow.
For more information, visit the TravelClick website here.
[Words by Jan Tissera, president of international sales, TravelClick]
CBRE Hotels:
CBRE Hotels is a division of the CBRE Group, Inc., the largest full service, real estate and investment organisation in the world. CBRE Hotels operates as a specialised group within CBRE and provides hospitality and real estate industry professionals with a global practice with our one-stop shop of unparalleled, global and fully-integrated real estate services and products.
CBRE Hotels’ Americas Research owns the database for Trends® in the Hotel Industry, the statistical review of U.S. hotel operations which first appeared in 1935 and has been published every year since. CBRE Research professionals use the Trends® database to assist their clients in making informed decisions. In addition, the Trends® data is used to produce custom financial reports for clients that enable them to benchmark hotel revenues, expenses, and profits.
More recently with the rise in not only guest, but also owner and investor sentiment for boutique hotels, each quarter we now provide updated forecasts of performance for the boutique and lifestyle segment of the lodging industry based on six industry competitive classification categories. In addition, the quarterly reports contain CBRE’s latest forecast data for the overall U.S. lodging industry, commentary on the vital economic indicators impacting U.S. lodging performance, development activity within the boutique and lifestyle segment. Additionally, in the September edition, we extract data from our Trends® in the Hotel Industry database and provide metrics for boutique and lifestyle hotels to assist owners and operators benchmark the financial performance of their properties.
Given the high occupancy levels generally achieved by boutique hotels in the U.S. throughout 2018, it will be a challenge to increase occupancy once again in 2019 and beyond. While the fundamentals remain attractive across the vast majority of submarkets, elevated uncertainty (among other factors) has impaired management’s ADR pricing power. This has also contributed to weaker-than-expected NOI growth. While we anticipate the performance of boutique hotels to remain relatively healthy, there is no time like the present to benchmark hotel performance, especially in light of labor costs that are increasing at a greater rate than RevPAR in a number of markets across the country.
For more information, visit CBRE’s website here.
