Why Benchmarking Has Become an Industry-Standard Practice

Hospitality is a fiercely competitive industry. Brands compete with one another for mindshare and loyalty, spending huge sums on advertising campaigns and loyalty programs that aim to capture guests’ attention and wallets. Meanwhile, individual properties work to stay one step ahead of the hotels down the street by providing more personalized service, renovating rooms, executing better local marketing campaigns, hiring the most talented employees and getting stronger online reviews, for example. 

The hospitality industry is so competitive that benchmarking has become common across all departments because it allows you to gain an independent perspective on how well you perform compared to other hotels. With this insight, you can easily see performance gaps, identify areas for improvement and develop a standardized set of processes and metrics to track your success going forward. 

Average review rating, review response rate and review frequency are vital benchmarks for hotels since a strong online reputation drives increased revenue. As hotels move their marketing spend online, they also need to understand how their website and email marketing performance stacks up to other hotels. For this reason, website bounce rates, email open rates, click through and conversion metrics are important. 

In 2008 we introduced Comp Sets in Revinate Reputation to allow you to see how your review scores compare to those in your competitive set. I once had a small boutique hotel ask to replace their Comp Set of local hotels in the same category with four well-known Four Seasons Hotels because they wanted to measure their success in hospitality against the finest hotels in the world. We loved that approach because we know benchmarking drives results.

For that reason, we recently added a new Market Benchmark Report to Revinate Reputation which allows properties and groups to better understand how a hotel or hotel set is performing across a large market of properties. This report makes the data benchmarkable and enables hoteliers to take more actionable steps to improve their business. Each property has a default benchmark by class and property, but additional markets can be added or customized by region, country, or affiliation.

Market Benchmark Report

If you aren’t regularly comparing your performance against that of others in the industry, (or outside it) you are missing out on a valuable opportunity to push yourself to be better. We publish our Benchmark Reports annually for Reputation and Marketing because we know how powerful it can be to see your performance against other customers. Check them out and if you fall below your peers, it’s time to put some action plans together. Need some help understanding how you stack up? Reach out. We would love to help.