Nicole Adair joins 15 experts to weigh in on Benchmarking & traditional comp sets

"Many, if not most, hotels have more than one comp set," explains Nicole Adair, Director of Revenue Management for Hire at SHR. "Depending upon product, a hotel might find itself competing against a different mix for corporate vs. group vs. transient leisure. One thing that has not changed post-COVID is the necessity for hotels to really be honest with themselves when it comes to their product and against whom they are benchmarking. An 80% index vs. 100% on occupancy is not necessarily "underperforming" if you are a CBD-located independent in a sea of brands looking at midweek performance, and a 120% vs. 100% on ADR isn't "outperforming" if you are not comping vs. truly similar product." 

"I would argue that traditional KPIs haven't become meaningless, but that benchmarking the percent-change metric is increasingly relevant. What *has* changed is the need for revenue leaders to really drill down on the underlying drivers behind this data and evaluate from a more holistic perspective. Pre-COVID, many could get away with "Occupancy is too high and ADR is too low. Raise the rate." type of analysis. Forward-looking data will only continue to grow in importance, as well, and can provide more actionable insights for revenue managers watching their business change in real time."

"The traditional competitive set selection process in the US has always been driven by financial models, which are developed to satisfy financing and banking requirements. As such, they are usually based on aspirational comp sets in order to show future growth opportunity and return on investment. Regardless, hotels should always have external validation to compare their performance as opposed to only looking at year-over-year factors and get a true measure of current market conditions. In order to determine a relevant comp set, however, hotels should consider the following areas: number of rooms, location & distance from the property, meeting space square footage, and property type or class. However, reality is that in very few instances you can come up with a perfect competitive set of hotels where all properties equally compete on all market segments."

Raul Moronta's guest appearance on the Soundbites podcast.

"In most cases, hotels compete with different hotels on different market segments, such as Corporate, Transient, OTA, FIT, Group Association or SMERF. Hotels should identify these sub comp sets and create targeted strategies to compete at each level. As the competitive landscape changes, so should the selected competitors. Companies such as STR, Kalibri Labs, and others have developed a number of tools and reporting to do just that, which help our hotels determine how to maximize their revenue streams better than our competitors."

Read the other 13 experts' thoughts here in the original article posted by hospitalitynet.org.