How to Grow Your Market Share and Outpace Your Competition With Forward-looking Hotel Benchmarking

Ever feel like you’re driving your hotel’s strategy by looking in the rearview mirror?

Constantly trying to predict your path forward by analyzing what’s behind you.

Well the hospitality market moves fast and keeping up is far from easy. To set yourself apart from the competition, you need to anticipate what’s coming around the corner.

Our industry demands foresight, not just hindsight and if you’re still relying on historical data to benchmark your performance, maximizing revenue, boosting your Revenue Generating Index (RGI), and growing your market share will continue to be an uphill battle. 

As a Revenue Manager, Sales & Marketing Manager, or an Executive overseeing hotel assets, you know the stakes are high. Your decisions directly impact profitability, asset value, and team performance. 

To make sure you can make well-informed decisions, we’ve introduced Benchmark Insight. It provides instant clarity on your competitive position through historical and forward-looking occupancy, Average Daily Rate (ADR), Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) and more, refreshed daily, combined with an AI-powered smart competitive set (compset) for true competitive insights. 

But, first, what do we really mean when we talk about benchmarking in the context of the hotel industry. 

What exactly is hotel benchmarking and why does it matter?

At its core, hotel benchmarking is about understanding your performance in relation to your competitors. 

Typically, it involves comparing key metrics against a set of similar properties to see how you compare; where you are falling behind, what you can improve, where you are winning and what you should do more of. 

It provides context and a vital snapshot of where you stand in the market.

The challenge? Most traditional benchmarking data is historical. It tells you what has happened. While useful for validation, it leaves you constantly reacting to past trends rather than proactively shaping your future performance. 

In a highly competitive market that shifts by the hour, that’s a limitation.

Do your current hotel benchmarking insights fall short? 

At points in your career, you’ve likely invested significant time and resources into gathering market intelligence, hoping it would provide the basis for concrete decision making. Yet, you find out that the very data meant to empower your decisions instead leaves you with more questions than answers. 

Too often, it doesn’t quite measure up to expectations and fails to provide the clarity and direction you need.

Unreliable data quality

How often have you looked at benchmark reports with a sense of doubt? You might question the reliability of the data sources, wonder if the sample size is truly representative, or whether your competitor data is genuinely up-to-date. 

Additionally, when your compsets are outdated or incomplete, the comparisons become less valid, making it incredibly difficult to make the right decisions. 

To make informed decisions at speed, you need to trust your data implicitly, and often, that trust simply isn’t there.

The granularity gap and the search for deeper insights

Generic insights just don’t cut it anymore. Traditional benchmarking solutions often lack the granularity you need for sophisticated strategies. 

Trying to apply broad market trends to specific initiatives at your hotel, like detailed guest segmentation or highly targeted promotions, won’t deliver the results you or the board want. 

You might have the big picture, but you’re missing the fine brushstrokes that allow for truly impactful adjustments. You need data you can drill down into, not just surface level insights. 

Beyond validation: The need for actionable intelligence

The pressure is real for Revenue Managers, where improving RGI or moving your competitive position in the market can significantly impact your annual incentives.

If a tool only validates what you already suspect, or tells you where you were, it’s not truly helping you improve or maintain your position. The data presented needs to be more than just a report card. 

You want the why behind your position and the actions needed to positively alter it.

For this you need actionable data that guides your next move, helps you justify pricing changes, and enables you to proactively seize opportunities, rather than merely confirming past results.

Forecasting your future performance: The power of forward-looking benchmark data in the hospitality industry

Imagine strategizing from a vantage point where your entire market landscape is revealed, not just your immediate surroundings. 

That’s what Benchmark Insight can bring to your strategy.

Your benchmarking crystal ball: Predictive ADR & RevPAR

Instead of focusing solely on what happened last week or last month, we provide you with forward-looking ADR and RevPAR data, to show you what’s projected to happen in the coming weeks and months.

With these predictive data points, you can then:

• Proactively adjust your pricing strategy to capitalize on a range of scenarios in your market, from demand surges to mitigating potential dips.

• Optimize inventory management well in advance, ensuring you’re selling the right rooms at the right price, at the right time.

• Empower your sales and marketing teams to launch targeted campaigns when they’ll have the biggest impact, anticipating market shifts before they occur.

With this forward-looking visibility, you move beyond the typical reactive stance of your competitors. You can determine the state of your future revenue performance and start shaping your commercial strategy, with data-driven decisions to achieve your goals. 

Intelligent and customizable competitor sets

Knowing the future of the market is powerful, but it’s even more so when you know  the competition is positioned within that future. 

Benchmark Insight offers smart compsets. This means you can:

• Define highly relevant competitor sets that truly reflect your market and strategic objectives.

• Dynamically adjust these sets as the market changes or your strategy evolves, ensuring your comparisons are always against the most pertinent market factors.

• Integrate these tailored compsets with forward-looking data to gain deep, nuanced insights into how specific segments of your competitive landscape are projected to perform.

This combination enables you to anticipate general market trends, understand your position amidst those trends, enabling precise and impactful strategic decisions to take your property to the top of the ladder.

Insight to impact: Achieving superior commercial performance 

Gone are the days of trying to make sense of raw data or comb through confusing visualizations. Benchmark Insight transforms how you operate, turning complex data into tangible results.

Improving your Revenue Generation Index

Anyone familiar with hotel benchmarking metrics – and you probably are – will agree that RGI is paramount. It is a critical measure of whether you’re capturing your fair share of revenue compared to your competitors. 

RGI is affected by a number of interconnected metrics, RevPAR itself being the most obvious one and, by extension, room rates and occupancy. A strong RGI, consistently above 1.0, signals that your pricing and occupancy strategies are hitting their mark.

To get a picture of how your RGI is tracking against your competitors, you need to consistently collect and analyze data from your competitors. Benchmark Insight automates the collection and analysis of data for critical KPIs, such as RGI, so you can track your competitive standing with ease using a single dashboard.

But, not only can you track RGI in Benchmark Insight (along with Market Penetration Index and Average Rate Index) but by having ADR, RevPAR and occupancy in a single dashboard, you can strategize to improve your RGI and get the edge on your competitors.

Driving revenue with a clear and thoughtful strategy

By having a clear view of future market dynamics and the ability to define highly relevant competitor sets, you can make decisions with unparalleled accuracy. 

This translates into optimized revenue and improved profitability. You’ll be able to capture demand more effectively, price more intelligently, and ultimately, grow your market share.

Imagine the confidence of knowing you’re always a step ahead, ready to capitalize on opportunities before your competitors have seen them. 

Empowering your commercial teams

For you and your team, this tool becomes an indispensable asset. It provides the actionable data and performance metrics needed to not only track but actively maintain and improve competitive position. 

No more feeling like your benchmarking tool is just there to confirm results; it becomes your compass, guiding your strategic adjustments. Your team will feel more confident, more informed, and more capable of achieving revenue goals.

Confidence in your commercial decision making

Whether you’re a Director of Revenue Management planning across multiple properties, an Executive setting corporate strategy, or an Asset Manager overseeing investment value, the precision and foresight provided by Lighthouse means greater confidence in your strategy.

You’ll have the actionable insights to make better hotel revenue management decisions, allocate resources more effectively, and to help you ensure long-term profitability. 

Why Benchmark Insight stands alone in the marketplace

In a world drowning in data, Benchmark Insight provides laser-sharp focus on your contextual performance with truly actionable market insights. 

We combine superior data quality and comprehensive coverage with unmatched granularity and, most crucially, forward-looking insights. This is a pivotal shift in how you perceive and engage with your market.

When you partner with Lighthouse, you’re joining a community of forward-thinking hoteliers who are proactively shaping their success with cutting edge, real-time data sets that have true meaning for their business. 

Ready to drive up RGI and ensure your hotel performs above your compset?

Achieving superior hotel performance is within your grasp, it’s time to shed outdated perspectives and embrace the advantage of foresight in hotel benchmarking. Gain the clarity, confidence, and competitive edge that only forward-looking data can provide.

Start your free trial today to discover how Benchmark Insight can empower your team and elevate your revenue strategy with real, decision oriented intelligence.

Jonathan Gough

Jonathan Gough is Content Team Lead at Lighthouse, spearheading all things content marketing. With a marketing career of over a decade, dedicated solely to travel, tourism and hospitality, Jonathan is passionate about leveraging Lighthouse’s technology to move the sector forward and provide lodging professionals with the tools they need to grow their business.

About Lighthouse

Lighthouse (formerly OTA Insight) is the leading commercial platform for the travel & hospitality industry. We transform complexity into confidence by providing actionable market insights, business intelligence, and pricing tools that maximize revenue growth. We continually innovate to deliver the best platform for hospitality professionals to price more effectively, measure performance more efficiently, and understand the market in new ways.

Trusted by over 65,000 hotels in 185 countries, Lighthouse is the only solution that provides real-time hotel and short-term rental data in a single platform. We strive to deliver the best possible experience with unmatched customer service. We consider our clients as true partners – their success is our success.

This article originally appeared on Lighthouse.