Best hotel market intelligence

What is hotel market intelligence?

Hotel market intelligence is a solution that allows you to have better control over your property’s revenue by using it to inform the way you set your rates.

Market intelligence provides real-time data on your local destination and competitors to give you insight into market conditions.

What is the role of market intelligence?

The role of market intelligence for your hotel is to provide accurate and relevant data which allows you to identify trends and opportunities when setting your room rates and creating offers.

With real-time insights and reports, you can make strategic decisions much faster to maximise revenue.

What is an example of market intelligence?

An example of market intelligence available to your hotel is SiteMinder. SiteMinder is the industry’s leading hotel platform with features such as a channel manager, booking engine, and website builder.

Also available is Insights, a hotel market intelligence tool. This allows hoteliers to track local market conditions, forecast demand, keep an eye on competitor rates, and maintain rate parity.

This page will help you choose the right option for your individual property – the depth of features you need could vary a lot depending on the size, location, target market, and more, of your hotel.

Benefits of market intelligence for hotels

Understandably, you might still be harbouring doubts about why you need a market intelligence tool. Certainly, you can price rooms, set rates, and establish a revenue management strategy without it.

The crux of the matter boils down to one question; are you doing it as effectively as your competitors are?

To keep up with every other smart operator out there, you absolutely must be using data to inform your hotel business decisions. However, the scope of what you can do can be quite limited when spreadsheets are your most sophisticated method of analysis. 

The major benefit of market intelligence is that it will make it easier to both access and understand complex information. Instead of spending hours collecting data and trying to make sense of it, you’ll be able to see clear paths forward in just minutes by running automatic reports and having them displayed in easily digestible formats.

When you are making your purchase decision, you should also keep in mind that this isn’t simply an upgrade, it’s an entirely new window of opportunity to make more money out of your existing hotel property.

Must-have features of hotel market intelligence software

There’s a lot of potential when it comes to market intelligence software and you’ll be unlocking large amounts of data. It’s important that the provider you use knows what to do with this data and how to present it to you in a way that’s relevant and useful for your hotel. It needs to make the picture of your revenue management strategy clearer, not more complicated.

Before you make a purchase decision, ensure the tool you’re looking at is equipped with these features:

• All-day visibility of local supply and demand
• Real-time alerts
• Compare room rates with competitors in one view
• Know local market pricing up to one year in advance
• Unlimited rate shopping
• Exportable reports
• Rate strategy rule creation

It’s also vital that your market intelligence software is able to integrate with other important systems such as your channel manager. This will allow you to access even more powerful data and give you greater visibility on the health of your business. For instance, pace reports and booking performance reports can be created by combining the capabilities of both features.

For this reason, choosing a provider that has an ‘all-in-one’ nature can be helpful.

Types of hotel predictive market intelligence

As we’ve already alluded to, there are many different types of hotel intelligence tools on the market.

They might:

• Be targeted towards smaller independent hotels
• Be targeted towards enterprise groups
• Offer customisable tools and niche products
• Focus solely on revenue management
• Specialise in food and beverage services

Obviously, it’s crucial that you’re very clear about what type of hotel intelligence you need before jumping into a product, and that the one you choose can deliver on your requirements.

Regardless of the type of tool that you choose, it needs to have the infrastructure to handle large amounts of data. This means it can collect large amounts of data and also store and load it efficiently into reports and graphs.

The next step is analysing the data effectively and placing it in digestible dashboards for you, giving you clear summaries and overviews that you can also integrate to other devices and print reporting documents at your leisure.

Essentially, it must be an enabler, which is why you need to research your options carefully.

With so many vendors on the market, many of them offering similar products and many offering unique specialised products, it can be a nightmare to identify who to join forces with.

If you have narrowed your focus down to a hotel price optimisation tool, you can further evaluate your options by looking at a number of key factors including:

• Brand reputation
• Industry experience
• Customer base
• Integration power
• Media coverage

Looking at these elements will allow you to build confidence in a brand if they tick all the boxes. Industry experience and specialisation is particularly important. You need a tech partner that has survived beyond the early start-up years and exists to serve hotels specifically.

Cost of hotel market intelligence solutions

Hotel market intelligence software requires some significant development but the price is still very reasonable in most cases and the potential return on investment is very high.

Look for a provider that has a set monthly payment option – rather than any kind of contractual agreement or commission based model. This gives you more freedom and you can always move to a contract if you’re happy with the service and want to get a discount.

In most cases the amount you pay each month will depend on the size of your property, i.e the total number of rooms your hotel has. In the case of SiteMinder the price will remain steady all the way up to 50+ rooms. Only larger properties with more data to handle will have to pay more than the base rate.

To see how your property fits in, visit SiteMinder’s pricing scale.

The results of using market intelligence data for hotels

It’s all very well to invest in a solution and feel good about your decision but you have to know what results to expect. Measuring success is vital moving forward, since you may want to unlock more features, seek support to optimise your experience, or use a different provider if the first one isn’t working out.

If you are using your tool for rate intelligence and pricing, some outcomes you should be looking for include:

• Maximise revenue and profit by removing guesswork
• Optimise pricing based on supply and demand
• Drive direct bookings with rate parity
• Enhance your market positioning and business performance
• Compare room rates with up to 10 competitors at once
• Increase your chances of being booked by competitive rate setting
• Constant access to the latest market information
• Eliminate the need for endless spreadsheets
• Produce reports with one click
• Minimise the impact of market fluctuations on your pricing
• Take immediate action via alerts and preset rules
• Stay ahead with analysis on how your property is performing online
• Avoid unnecessary commission fees to third-party booking sites

Even this list isn’t exhaustive so there’s a lot to look out for – make sure your provider can deliver on these capabilities.

Comparing market intelligence providers

Another way to be sure you’re making the right choice is to directly compare a few of the options you’re considering.

Do this by looking at each of them and assessing:

• Ease of use
• Range of functions
• ROI
• Customer support
• Implementation process
• Integration
• Price
• And more!

It might be hard to do all of this independently, so it’s best to use professional websites to compare providers. Hotel Tech Report is one of the most reliable resources to look at.

Here you’ll find aggregated scores and ratings for all the features above, as well as general recommendation scores and rankings against other products. You’ll also see what type of properties the product is most popular for.

In addition, you’ll find customer reviews from other hoteliers who are using the same product. They rate many of the features and add comments about their experience. This is valuable tangible feedback for you to get a sense of whether the tool will deliver what you need.

You can even go looking on social media pages to source reviews and get a sense of a brand’s relationship with its followers. Is the company responsive and open? Are followers happy and complimentary?