Hotel Competitive Analysis: How to Do & Why Does It Matter
Competition has significantly increased in every other industry and has forced many business owners to adopt different strategies to stay ahead in the competition.
The hospitality industry is also no exception & suffers from cut-throat competition for which it is important for hoteliers to adopt to suitable strategies to get an edge in the market.
A hotel competitor analysis starts by understanding your competition in the nearby area and all the different amenities they are offering to attract more customers to their business.
This is important to devise a winning strategy for your hotel that not only will help you set apart but will also help you to win more customers.
In this article, we will know what is hotel competitor analysis is, how you can do it for your business, and why it matters.
What Is Hotel Competitor Analysis?
A Hotel Competitor Analysis is a strategy that hotels adopt to evaluate and compare their services and pricing within the same region with their competitors.
A handy Hotel competitor report helps them to make effective decisions for the future and generate a feasible amount of profitability.
Also, it gives them an insight into the different services, pricing, and other factors that their competitors offer.
This way hoteliers can assess how well they are doing against their competition.
The hotel industry competitive analysis is the right method to maintain a suitable brand image among your customers and also with the chance to stand one step ahead of the competition.
There are generally four to five different competitors of hotels at a particular location which needs to be kept in mind while doing the analysis.
Importance of Hotel Competitive Analysis Data To Get Ahead
Hotel market analysis holds great importance and helps any hotel business to get ahead in the competition.
Performing a hotel competition analysis helps hoteliers to devise a plan that not only improves services but also formulates a scalable plan of action in case of future expansion.
And this could only be done when you have a thorough understanding of major competitors in the hotel industry and their offered services.
Apart from this, a competitive analysis of the hotel industry will help you to devise your hotel’s unique value proposition.
To achieve an edge in the market, you must possess something different and useful to attract customer attention.
In spite of that, one more thing is important for the hotel competitor’s analysis that drives results for you. Which is identifying the hotel comp set (hotel competitor set). No matter how good your marketing strategy is, but if you fail to identify the right competitors. Check out this blog to learn more about the hotel comp set and how can you identify it.
How to Do Competitor Analysis for Your Hotel?
1. Pricing Analysis
Nothing is more important than understanding your competitor’s pricing strategy.
Having the right pricing strategy will make or break your business and even the slightest difference from your competitors can help you achieve the advantage in getting more bookings.
This is why for understanding the competition’s pricing strategy becomes crucial. Conducting competitive pricing analysis for hotels using a hotel competitor analysis tool that provides current and historical price history data, and keeping an eye on when they lower or raise their prices is the right start.
One of the best hotel rate intelligence tools through which you can keep an eye on competitors is by using a hotel price API.
One such hotel aggregator API for price analysis is Makcorps which helps you monitor the real-time pricing of your competitors.
It instantly crawls through 200+ OTA platforms and comes up with the pricing of different hotels in a single get query.
So, for instance, if you want to look at the current pricing of all the hotels in your nearby area, you can use Makcorps price comparison API, to instantly catch up on the pricing strategy of your competitors.
Watch the video to learn how you can get competitor’s pricing data using Makcorps Hotel API:
2. Swot Analysis
Swot Analysis which is also known as competitive grid analysis is a measurable plan of action used by hoteliers to get an understanding of their own strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and end threats.
By analyzing SWOT, you can easily identify what threats are presented by the competition, what is their strength and how to converts their weaknesses into opportunities!
While on the other hand, strengths and weaknesses are the internal part of the organization, and threats and opportunities are the external factors that can be regulated and used to their advantage.
In this way, you can easily optimize your business functions accordingly to achieve a competitive advantage. Hotels SWOT analysis examples include –
- Understanding Strengths – Our hotel has a better and bigger pool and other leisure amenities.
- Weaknesses – Our booking system is quite slow.
- Threats – Competitors might have smart technology for the booking process that we don’t have.
- Opportunity– Getting updated with the latest booking technology.
As you can see from the example, we have turned our weaknesses and threats into an opportunity to upgrade our hotel system and attract more customers for the booking.
3. Social Media Analysis
In the new era, social media analysis plays a great role in doing a competitor analysis for your hotel.
You can find the social media handles of each competitor hotel and observe the quality of their content and the frequency of posting it.
Through social media competitor analysis for hotels, you can get an insight into their engagement of audiences to optimize the strategy on your own.
If they are active but not engaging with their audiences, you can use the opportunity and start engaging with your customers through different social media handles.
Try running different contests, giveaways, discounts, offers, live sessions, and polls, to engage with your audience.
5 Strategies to Win Over Your Hotel Competitors
Here are some of the strategies to win over your hotel competitors and gain an edge.
1. Pricing Strategy
It is very helpful to maintain a competitive edge when you have a clear insight into the rates of your competitors on a regular basis.
This is why hoteliers use different hotel rate shopping tools for creating outstanding yield management strategies.
Yield management is one of the most accurate methods to not just only forecast your pricing and demands, but actually calculate the demand forecast based on the real-time data and deduce a suitable pricing strategy for the year around.
2. Hotel Business Intelligence Tools
Using a hotel business intelligence tool can update you with real-time market data, and know-how about the current trends in the industry.
You can use this valuable information to always make the right pricing decisions and remain competitive in your field.
3. Guest Review is Important
Guest experience is usually the best method to get actual information about your property’s image in the mind of the customers.
This is one of the efficient ways through which you can make useful improvements in your hotel.
Also, customers might get a good indication about your hotel if you want to include their suggestions in your improvements.
You can assign your frontline staff to constantly take feedback from the customers staying in the hotel.
Providing customers with actually what they want would immediately provide you with a great competitive start.
4. Checking Promotions Is Necessary
Comparing promotions with your competitors can give you opportunities to win guests over.
Thus, it is essential that you constantly check your competitors and keep an eye on their promotional strategy.
For instance, if they are providing a particular deal for two days, maybe you can take advantage and provide your customers with the same deal for three days.
But meanwhile, don’t forget to check whether the promotion strategy aligns with your overall budget or not.
5. Keep An Eagle’s Eye On Your Competitors
For an effective competitive analysis strategy, the key is to create a hotel competitor report to keep a constant eye on your competitors and check upon every action that might interest customers.
This will keep you updated with the current range of the market and also will provide you with new ideas to attract customers.
Conclusion
Conducting a perfect hotel industry competitive analysis is not a cup of tea for everyone and requires a lot of effort.
But by following our guide one step at a time you can get the leverage to set your business operations in a profitable manner.
Conduct a SWOT analysis to get a deeper understanding of your business and also about your competitors to accordingly optimize your business strategy.
Don’t forget that merely copying your competitors would not give you much result.
Setting apart your own unique vision in front of the customers with the best possible amenities can help you shape your winning strategy.
And since we are conducting a competitive analysis, one thing that truly matters is continuously watching your competition to maintain a positive brand image in front of your customers.
Adopt the above-mentioned strategies and build a powerful hotel brand image.
