Managing Seasonal Market Changes to Ensure your Hotel Stays on Top – Part 2

Blog Series – Part 2 of 4

In part 1 of this blog series “Managing Seasonal Market Changes to Ensure your Hotel Stays on Top”, we discussed Seasonal Distribution and gave some tips on diving into analytics and setting up successful strategies. In Part 2 of this series, we are going to discuss “How You Can Maximize Your Room Type Sales for Each Season”.

The first step in maximizing room type sales to deal with seasonality changes involves gathering data. We often analyze overall room sales stats, but forget to review the analytics of room types. Dive into historical data and looking at things like-

• Occupancy per room type per month – This will allow you to see if you have the demand or lack the demand for certain room types in specific months.

• ADR per room type per month – This will allow you to see where you have peaks and valleys in your ADR by room type and also see if there are months that you are often upgrading rather than selling certain room types.

Next, take that a step further by looking at-

• Booking window per room type per month – Now that you have the occupancy data per room type, you can take this a step further by diving into when your room types are being booked. This will allow you to determine the proper sales strategy per room type.

• Channel per room type per month – From this, you can see which channels are selling the majority of your room types. For example, perhaps there is a specific channel that tends to book your suites and others that never book suites. From looking at this data, you can also speak with your market managers about how you can promote your different room types to better sell.

• Feeder markets per room type per month – From this data, you can see if you have specific feeder markets that tend to book suites or alternatively, tend to book single rooms.

Once you have the data and can make sense of it, use it to put the optimal distribution strategy in place per room type.

The next step in optimizing room type sales is pricing per room type. This obviously depends a lot on the way your room types are linked to your channel manager, but a Reliable Channel Manager should give you the option to set-up room type supplements by season/dates. Take this example:

From here, you can play with your room type supplements to ensure that you are making the most of the room type sales. You can also take this one-step further by setting room type supplements on a day of week basis as well, for example, Mon-Thu and Fri-Sun. These small steps in pricing optimization by room type can help to push your RevPar and maximize sales!

Keep a close watch on this space for the third part of this series, in which we will be discussing – The Power of Value-adds to Increase Bookings.