Competitor analysis is a way for your hotel to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your local peers, so you can benchmark yourself and identify your position in the market.
NB: This is an article from SiteMinder
This allows you to understand if you are pricing your property correctly and make decisions that give you a competitive advantage. This might also mean:
- Creating strategies that make it difficult for new competition to enter the market
- Using guest insights to improve your service above the competition
- Showing you the unique selling points your property should focus on
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Using a simple example; if you and a competitor are priced the same but your hotel offers better value and/or quality, you have the opportunity to increase your rates for higher profit.
How to perform hotel benchmarking
There are a few steps to performing your analysis, and all are crucial.
Establish your hotel’s competitive set
Your competitive set is who you will compare yourself to. This means you need to correctly identify any hotels that could take business away from yours.
Factors include:
- Proximity – Hotels that are in close geographic proximity to yours, even if they offer a slightly different experience, can be considered competitors. Of course, if you are luxury and they are budget you may discount them.
- Positioning – This refers to the product and experience offered to guests. For example; Budget, Midscale, Upscale, and Luxury to name a few. You should be looking at hotels who position themselves in a similar way to you.
- Price – It makes sense that any hotel with a similar rate structure to your hotel is going to be a competitor.
- Product – Are there hotels near you offering up similar room types and amenities? Add them to your competitive set.
Some other ways you could consider when building a comp-set include looking at target audiences, seasonality, and aspirations. When we say aspirations, it means that if you intend to renovate and upscale your business you should look at who your competitors will be once this is complete.
Choose and score competitive attributes
Once you have around four or five competitors to analyse, you need to decide how you will compare everyone.
Examples of what you might assess are price, location, amenities, rooms and features, or reviews.
Next give each characteristic a score out of 10 (or whatever you want to use) for your property and each competitor.
Then, take the average of these scores and plot all the hotels on a graph. It might look something like this:
