Hotel Comp Set Analysis: How to Identify It To Outperform Your Competitors
If you’re a part of the hotel revenue management or hotel booking business where every move counts, staying ahead of the competition is crucial.
You need an essential weapon that gives you a bird’s eye view of the market and helps you make strategic decisions.
In this blog post, we’ll break down the basics of competitive set in the hotel industry, including what it is and how you can identify the correct one for your hotel for an effective hotel competitive analysis to gain a competitive edge.
Because we believe that success is measured by how well a hotel performs compared to its comp set.
So, stay attuned till the end.
What is a Comp Set?
A hotel comp set, short for “competitive set,” includes a group of hotels that are considered direct competitors to each other. These hotels usually share similar characteristics, such as size, location, or guest amenities, which makes them comparable in the eyes of potential guests.
Hotel managers use this set to gauge how well their property is performing by comparing metrics like room rates, occupancy rates, and services against those of the hotels in the comp set. This comparison helps them identify strengths to promote, weaknesses to improve, attract more guests and increase revenue.
Understand it by this example: Sunny Shores, a beachfront hotel in Miami, forms a comp set with Ocean View Retreat and Blue Horizon Inn to evaluate its market standing. These hotels share similar attributes such as location, size, and target market which makes them direct competitors. The manager of Sunny Shores reviews metrics like room rates, guest services, and satisfaction scores. Noticing that Ocean View Retreat enjoys higher guest ratings due to its superior spa services, Sunny Shores can decide to upgrade its spa offerings to boost its own ratings and attract more visitors.
To understand more precisely, learn how to do comp set analysis for your hotel our hotel by watching this video:
Why Choosing The Right Competitive Set Matters?
Not every hotel in the same city is a right competitor, and realistically, you can’t (and shouldn’t) track them all. The real value lies in identifying a competitive set that closely aligns with your property in key areas such as service offerings, hotel size, market positioning, revenue potential, and target audience.
A well-defined comp set matters because it:
- Provides accurate benchmarking for performance and pricing.
- Helps you identify market trends relevant to your segment.
- Ensures more effective revenue management strategies.
- Allows meaningful performance comparisons instead of misleading data from unrelated properties.
- Supports informed decision-making on marketing, promotions, and product development.
In short, conducting a thorough hotel competitive set analysis ensures that you benchmark your performance against the right properties that allow smarter pricing and marketing decisions.
How Do You Identify Your Hotel Competitors?
To analyze your hotel competitors effectively, you must first understand your own strengths and weaknesses.
Start by listing the key features and benefits your property offers, then compare them to the offerings of other hotels in your area. Your major focus should be on hotels that are similar in size, amenities, and target audience.
You must know that successful sales strategies are built on accurate comp set breakdowns, which form the basis of effective hotel performance benchmarking. Moreover, by leveraging AI, you can enhance the efficiency of your sales strategies. This is why you should take the time to research thoroughly, ideally with input from other team members.
Before you start identifying competitors, consider these 5 Ps, the core foundation for defining a comp set. Note them down:
- Proximity – How close are they to your location or key attractions?
- Pricing – Are their rates in the same range as yours?
- Positioning – How are they perceived in the market compared to you?
- Product – What services, facilities, and amenities do they offer?
- Purpose – Who are they targeting, and what guest needs are they meeting?
Evaluating these factors will give you a sharper sense of who your real competitors are an essential first step in understanding how to create a hotel comp set that accurately reflects your market. After completing this step.
Leverage these strategies for identifying your hotel competitors: –
1. Look For Hotels With Similar Pricing
For an effective comp set analysis, you must identify the hotels with similar pricing in the area.
To get the pricing data of those competitors, you can use MakCorps Hotel Price API. This API has extensive data as it provides hotel pricing data from 200+ hotels, hotel chains, and online travel agencies around the globe. The data will be in JSON format.
Curious? how can you extract the real-time hotel pricing data from the API? Watch the following video:
2. Subscribe To Emails
To keep a close eye on your competitors, you can subscribe to all of your competitor’s newsletters.
This will help you to recognize their strategy and how they use emails to stay at the top of the mind of their guests.
Also, you will be updated with any new promotions and news that they are using at the present time.
3. Checking Competitors’ Websites And Blogs
You must go through your competitor’s websites each month and read their blogs on a regular basis.
This will provide you a comparative hotel comp set analysis of what they are offering to that of your own.
If you come across a particular amenity that is becoming a major selling point, you can take note of it.
Think of something else that would solve the similar problem of the customers and also helps you stand out from the competition.
This is an effective method to constantly check up on trends in the current market.
4. Check Out Their Packages
While monitoring your competitors, you will come across different packages that they offer to their guests in exceptional cases.
These can be meeting packages, food and beverage packages, welcome baskets, and much more.
Create a unique and affordable package of your own that will help you stand out from your competition in the respective area.
Inclusive packages are a great option to attract more customers to your hotel as it becomes easy for customers to avail of the benefits instantly.
Conclusion:
A hotel comp set analysis is a powerful tool for understanding your market and staying competitive despite the tough competition. By identifying it, you can benchmark key performance indicators such as ADR (Average Daily Rate) and RevPAR (Revenue per Available Room) alongside occupancy levels to get a complete picture of your standing in the market.
Tracking ADR and RevPAR not only shows how well you’re monetizing your rooms but also highlights opportunities to adjust pricing, improve guest value, and outperform competitors.
When you combine these insights with real-time competitive pricing data from tools like the MakCorps Hotel Price API, you equip your hotel with the intelligence needed to make smart, data-driven decisions that increase revenue and market share.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How can I use comp set data to improve my hotel’s performance?
By identifying pricing opportunities, spotting underperforming areas, creating competitive packages, and optimizing your marketing strategy to highlight your unique selling points.
Neha Jangid writes for Makcorps, bringing over three years of hands-on experience in the hotel and travel data space. She digs deep into hotel APIs, flight info, and travel tech, turning complex details into easy-to-understand content that actually helps businesses and readers. Neha works closely with hospitality sites and industry experts to stay sharp and share practical insights. Her goal is simple: make travel data useful, not confusing.
