I guess the most common question is," Why bother?"
Well, if you are actively managing room rates you'll be using a list of competitors for comparison - room rates to beat - or market indicators around that shortlist that tell you to increase prices. But in many conversations I have had with hotel management , there's uncertainty the shortlist is correct.
When you are working every day in a hotel in one location, you'll start to feel it's obvious. But the reality is you're probably too close to the trees to see the forest. And if you get it wrong that's marketing budget misdirected, it's chasing the wrong bookers with the wrong message, and trying to beat other hotels rates that the distant booker online wasn't considering.
If you don't apply a factual methodology to create the shortlist for your room rate calculations, you'll have to guess. Did you methodically discover your real competitors or what?
Theses checklists and the survey will furnish you with the facts. And if you do all the work yourself those facts can be discovered for free - all the checklists and questions are on the forms and pictures on this website.
Why would you not want to be working with correct, factual information? It's a few hours work; either you do it, or you can hire us. All the costs and PDFs are on this website.
Questions? Give me a call 07920 110930 or email me chrisdowning@distantbooker.com
Chris Downing 11/05/23
Here are some ideas that will get you started on the checklists.
The first one you'll be doing is the 1+7 list where you will check off your own hotel's attributes and then do the same for 7 others. That may be easier in some locations that others. Where we have audited hotels in rural areas we might not even find 7 hotels in a 10 mile radius - so it's an easy task to make the list. But harder where hotel density is high. So, we'll take look at methodologies that will create the first 1+7 listing.
1. Firstly, it's easiest to pull up a first draft listing by using an Online Travel Agent (OTA) like Booking.com or Expedia. My first take would be to put our own hotel post code in the search criteria and work outwards - the list is then in distance order from our hotel post code outwards. Now the first problem - you might have a list with dozens of hotels on it if you have lots of competitors. If you are in a very rural area you may well have your list right now at this stage.
2. However, if you still have a big list we need to cut it down by adding some filters. I'd suggest a booker will be happy to upgrade to more hotel stars but disinclined to take less. So if our hotel has, say, 3 Stars then filter the list down to only 3 Stars and 4 Stars.
3. Price is an interesting filter because it's trying to guess what a booker might be looking for around his or her budget. Very few though, go for the very cheapest of anything. So on this occasion I'd bracket it something like £30 cheaper than our own hotel's average room price and then £60 above it.
4. Then lastly, quality scores. As a basic filter we don't want hotels on the list that are 0.2 - 0.3 less than our own hotel score because bookers looking at our hotel won't often be choosing a hotel with less quality for less cost. Look at it this way - hotels that have feedback that's worse than us (or significantly worse) are not good competitors in the eyes of a distant, online booker. So the filter is no more than 0.2 lower than us on an out of 5 rating and any that are above. (WE will look at the Cleanliness scores in the Deep Dive checklist where it's a real issue.)
Don't feel you are getting yourself confused in doing the filtering - any issues please feel free to call me on 07920 110930 and talk it through - no charge - no sales pitch either. All the above four points vary to some extent with each analysis - but it's a start. The resulting list will be manageable and we can create the first version of ourselves vs. 7 other hotels. We may have to do the checklist a few times before we are satisfied - but the point is, it gets down and then rate management from that point on is far more accurate than the guesses we applied before.
Chris Downing 3/5/23