Beating Your Hotel Competition

In today's competitive hospitality landscape, especially in busy cities, standing out as a hotel or short-term rental can be challenging. However, there are effective strategies to elevate your property above the competition and boost your occupancy, revenue, and visibility.

Understanding Your Competitors and Comp Sets

To excel, start by understanding your hotel competitors through a comprehensive competitive analysis, identifying your primary Competitive Set (Comp Set). A Comp Set is a group of hotels similar in location, target market, services, and amenities, which helps you benchmark performance and develop pricing and marketing strategies.

Before conducting any analysis, it is crucial to accurately determine your ideal hotel comp set. Many people rely on intuition or compare themselves to all properties in their city, but this is not the right approach for a hotel competitive analysis. Selecting the right properties is essential for making meaningful comparisons. Here's a more calculated technique to identify your comp set:

Establishing Your Competitive Set

Identify key attributes for your Comp Set:

• Location: Compete with nearby properties as travelers often prioritize location.
• Stars: Compare with hotels of the same star rating.
• Features: Consider unique amenities, like pools in sunny locations.
• Prices: Analyze competitor pricing to position your rates effectively.

For a more calculated approach to determining your Comp Set, consider factors like target audience, seasonal trends, and future aspirations. A precise selection of competitors will ensure an accurate and actionable analysis. You can request a personalized Com Set through the this link for more details.

Utilizing Booking.com’s Extranet Tools

Booking.com's Extranet simplifies competitor analysis. Use it to manage your Competitive Set, track performance metrics, and make data-driven decisions. Customize your analytics dashboard to compare your property with selected competitors and monitor your ranking.

The Extranet tools, such as the Ranking Dashboard, provide valuable insights into how your property is performing on Booking.com, allowing you to refine your strategies and improve your market position. For a detailed explanation on how to use Extranet to conduct a competitive analysis, go to the blog on our website.

Putting Competitive Insights into Action: Utilizing SWOT Analysis

After establishing your hotel Competitive Set and gathering valuable insights, the next crucial step is to transform these insights into a strategic, actionable plan. A highly effective way to achieve this is through a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis helps define a measurable plan of action.

Conducting a SWOT Analysis

Write down what you learned from your hotel competitive analysis to visualize it. The best way to do this is by using a SWOT analysis template. You can use the one provided in the blog or create your own. Here’s a quick overview:

• Strengths: Evaluate what sets your hotel apart from others, highlighting unique features, exceptional services, or superior location advantages.
• Weaknesses: Identify areas where your hotel falls short compared to competitors, such as outdated amenities, limited facilities, or subpar online presence.
• Opportunities: Look for external possibilities to improve and grow your business, like market trends favoring certain amenities, partnerships with local businesses, or increasing tourism in your area.
• Threats: Assess external challenges that could impact your hotel's performance, such as competitors offering superior amenities, better pricing, or more effective marketing strategies.

Based on this analysis, prioritize changes to optimize pricing and visibility.

Enhancing Visibility

The first factor you should tackle is visibility. This component is crucial if you want to successfully win from your competition. No matter how perfect your pricing strategy is, how beautiful your rooms are, or how great your review score is, it’s useless if potential guests can’t find your listing.

This is where OTA ranking management becomes an important tool for you to get more visibility online. OTA ranking management is a solution that implements an algorithm to scrape data from the biggest OTAs daily, analyze it, and target listings to push them up in the search results. This way, it guarantees higher rankings and significantly increases listing views.

An example of success with this approach is Historic Hotels, a Belgian independent hotel chain. By implementing OTA ranking management, they saw a 30% revenue surge in Ghent and a 40% increase in Aalst during the low season. Their hotels consistently appeared on Booking.com’s first page, leading to more direct bookings.

Conclusion

Navigating the competitive landscape of the hospitality industry demands strategic innovation and leveraging advanced technology. By understanding your Competitive Set and utilizing tools like Booking.com’s Extranet, you can make data-driven decisions to improve your visibility and attract more guests. Conducting a SWOT analysis and prioritizing key areas such as pricing and visibility are crucial for staying ahead. For more insights and industry trends, read the full blog here.