When potential guests arrive at your website, ensure that it is different from the dozens they’ve just visited. Focus your hotel’s online activities on data driven decisions and make your website a haven of carefully-selected images, content and rate plans.
No matter how chaotic the rapid changes in the industry may seem, revenue managers need to hold onto their minds and stick to the data. This includes the day to day data in the larger context of your hotel. By this, we mean putting it in the context of your segments and target markets, your hotel’s overall revenue strategy and your ultimate goals.
Keep reading for the 6 most important ways to use data.
1. Net Gain per Channel
Instead of reviewing the demand for each channel, analyse the net gain for each channel. That’s simply the revenue from that channel, minus all costs associated with it (advertising costs, commissions, etc.) When you look at how much you get from each channel, you can only get a true sense of its value when you also understand how much you give to that channel. How much does each channel return when commission costs are accounted for? What’s the Average Daily Rate for the channel? You may be surprised to see it’s your brand site delivering that higher ADR! Do your own analysis and remember: numbers don’t lie.
2. Historical Data
Looking back helps you plan for the future. Analyse the spend and lifetime patterns of each channel to understand if they have steadily raised or lowered the amount of revenue they bring in, whether they have non-revenue benefits (like exposure) that outweigh costs and more. For example, let’s look at Deal Sites. Yes, the rate is low and the commission can be high- but the exposure is great! Exposure, however, doesn’t pay the bills.
You need to analyse the lifetime value of guests that came to you from deal sites. Did they book again? Did they spend more than guests from other channels? If you can justify that short term pain to reward you in the long term, then its worth doing. However, if you find that the majority of guests from deal sites do not stay again, or do not spend more while staying, it may not be worth your while.
