Understand what guests are talking about them
Keep a track of their hotel online reputation on various review sites and hotel booking portals. See what guests are talking about them. Compare the same with the kind of reviews you have garnered. If guests have good things to say about the food or any other amenities, try to make changes if you find yourself lagging in those areas. Remember that guest reviews are an excellent source to help you understand your competition’s performance.
Try to know their marketing activities
For this, you need to sign-up for their emails. It will help you understand how they communicate with their guests while launching new amenities. You will also get to know what special steps they take to inform and attract guests during local festivals. Take for example the LA County Fair. If you can lay your hands on one of their emails specially designed to appeal to the crowd during the LA County Fair, it will give you a lot of insight on their marketing and promotion strategy. Overall, this exercise will help you understand their mailing frequency and guest engagement tactics.
Find out if they are technologically ahead of you
Like in any other business, technology is considered as a key enabler in the hotel industry, too. If your competitors are ahead of you in terms of ease and profitability of the business, chances are that they are using some of the new-age hospitality technology solutions.
For example, if you are still stuck with an on-premise Hotel PMS, you are bound to face operational bottlenecks. And if you find out that your competitors are using cloud Hotel PMS, you must change your approach as soon as possible. Because an on-premise PMS restricts your capabilities to streamline operations. It also doesn’t allow you to work with a host of other third-party solutions like channel manager and booking engine, etc. to make more out of today’s online hotel booking.
Additionally, a smart cloud PMS like Hotelogix helps you to connect with a host of advanced revenue management solution via deep integration. This would offer you insights on your competition pricing strategy, the local market demand based on the season and on the eve of special events. It has the potential to help hotels like you maximize profitability by finding the best combination of consumer demand and hotel supply in your locality.
Now, considering the fact that you have analysed your competitors by the parameters we just discussed, you are certainly in a better position to make better decisions. Because creating an insightful and strategic comparison between competing hotels is a critical factor to your hotel’s success.
