For any hotel business to survive and thrive in this industry, it has to have a perfect plan that works best for growth and hotel revenue hike. (Actually, this is how each business lasts!)
Why the need for a change in business plan?
Many antediluvian practices for business development are outdated and need a revamp. For instance, to cover the rising cost and working capital, marketing in the traditional ways won’t work now. To replace them and come up with the next best plan, you need to get access to accurate business insights.
In this digital era, your hotel data plays a pivotal role in hotel business development plan. The budget and resource allocation for attaining short-term goals are all decided based on how the hotel is performing in a quarterly period. For long-term goals, the yearly reports are accessible that allow you to plan for the coming years.
To derive on surefire decisions and to take your hotel revenue to the next level using analytical reports there is a need for a proper plan.
So, what are the areas you can take decisions after viewing the hotel revenue reports:
#1: Channel performance evaluation
The revenue report must give you graphical hotel data displaying the revenue generated from various sources and channels. Evaluation of various channels should help you derive on a decision that works best for your hotel business.
Which channel gives you the highest number of bookings, and what’s the total revenue you earned from each channel? This way you can decide or allocate rooms to various booking sources and increase your ROI respectively from the hotel revenue report.. Well, you get the idea!
#2: Decide your pricing strategy when you’re in demand
The graph represents the number of nights booked through your channels. Depending upon the period like monthly or yearly analysis, you come to know on which nights your hotel is high on occupancy. Whether on weekends or during festivals or in seasons your hotel is fully booked. This way you can plan in advance to earn higher hotel revenues in the peak season. By arranging more rooms or inflating the rates.
#3: Use insights to get more bookings
When you are planning for pricing strategy, you must get a look at the graphs which give you the exact count of bookings coming from different channels. Whether it is direct bookings or walk-ins or through OTAs, you get to know which of the booking sources give you the highest ROI via the hotel revenue insights.
So, from this report, you should be able to decide in advance when to stop receiving bookings from OTAs [to avoid paying high commissions] and focus on getting more direct bookings. In the same lines, on high occupancy days, you can inflate the rates and earn higher revenue.
#4: Opening future inventory on basis of booking lead time
From such detailed insights, you should be able to know the time duration before their arrivals in which your guests book with you. That is, let’s say a guest is arriving on 25th December, and he books with you on 15th December, that is, he booked 10 days before his arrival. So, 10 days is the booking lead time for this guest.
Longer your booking lead time, the better it is; as it shows how much eager your guests are to book with you.
If the booking lead time is less, like most of your guests are last-minute bookers; then you can create some last minute deals to earn some additional revenue.
#5: Run promotions and setup packages that give more value
Similarly, if you are running a promotion and want to know the response of the scheme, you can easily track the guest behavior. Besides you can run multiple promotions and sell varied packages parallelly at your hotel. Your revenue report should know how each of your promotion and package fared.
Accordingly, you can make changes in your marketing strategies. This way you can attract more guests and counter the competition in the market.
#6: Focus on room type
You can even plan out the necessary amenities required for a specific room category. Renovate rooms that are in high demand. Further, you can decide on implementing measures to improve their services and focus on areas which require immediate attention.
You can charge your guest based on hotel services and amenities. More the amenities and services are rendered, higher the value you get. So, based on this principle you can focus on which room type or suites can be enhanced and frame the right price for it.
#7: Reduce cancellations
Often times when you get more bookings, the rate of cancellation increases too. Deriving from the hotel data insight from the extranet, you can easily analyze which days more cancellation took place.
Moreover, you are now well informed of the reason behind bookings cancellation on these days. Thus, you can avoid taking bookings which have such instances, to minimize it. Or you can work on to improve your services that will prevent further cancellations.
#8: Get reports of hotel chain
So, running a hotel chain? Whether it is hotel A or hotel B, you get the revenue reports of all locations separately as well as all at once. From these reports, you should be able to compare which hotel has performed well and which hasn’t? This insight allows you to take a decision as to which area you need to focus on to get more business.
In short, earlier without any such analytics, as a hotelier, your strategy was based on assumptions. But now, it is data-driven.
