How hotels can use top-of-funnel data to capture recovering demand

As hoteliers engage in the budgeting process for 2021, one thing that’s clear is that demand and financial projections for the months ahead are anything but clear. What operators once relied on to produce an accurate budget - historical data, pace and pick‐up - are all but useless in this incredibly dynamic time.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of data available to help hoteliers make business decisions. In fact, new sets of data based on real forward‐looking insights are helping hoteliers understand traveler decisions earlier in the journey, before they’ve decided where to go and what type of accommodations best suit their needs.

Hoteliers have long struggled to understand more about the guest journey before booking, particularly in the research and dreaming phases. Now, these top‐of‐funnel data sets are helping hoteliers better understand traveler intent, which then helps them build strategies to ensure they are capturing any available demand with the right rates, packages and offers.

What new sets of data are available?

The majority of travelers today are booking within days of arrival, making it nearly impossible to use on-the‐books data to make decisions. So, instead of being reactive, revenue managers are getting proactive. Booking data has become much less important than higher‐funnel data sets like traveler search patterns and flight bookings.

Traveler search data – available from search engines, several leading OTAs and even your own website’s booking engine – provides a wealth of information. With it, hoteliers can see what destinations travelers are considering, what dates they’re hoping to travel, how long they’re looking to stay and what type of accommodations they want. Revenue managers can see which properties in their market are being searched the most and then determine how they stack up in terms of price and guest experience.

Search data also helps hoteliers understand how they compete with alternative accommodations in their market. Knowing that more travelers are searching for an Airbnb near you than your hotel will give you great insight into how to position your property and target those travelers.

Dynamic comp set data means your marketing team can now understand how your hotel’s rates and availability stack up against more competitors. No longer are you pigeonholed into comparing your hotel against a static group of hotels that you determined were competitors pre‐COVID. New tools automatically adjust your competitive set based on a number of factors, including your amenities, your star rating, your price, etc.

A dynamic comp set is especially important now, when many hotels in your market likely remain closed. Instead of including closed hotels in your comp set, rely on technology to branch out and find open hotels that compete with you on several of the above‐mentioned attributes.

Flight search and booking data provides very precise information that you can act on. When you know exactly how many people are coming to your market on any given day in the future, you can then build the right strategies to capture that audience.

How to action that data

As COVID has forced many operators to make significant reductions in staff, priorities have shifted dramatically and employees are doing more work with less time and fewer resources. Today, revenue, marketing, sales and operations teams are working more closely together, which helps each understand the other’s role in keeping the machine running.

For the revenue and marketing teams in particular, this will bring about positive change. When departments work together, aligned on common goals, they can accomplish much more. Instead of simply running promotions to fill need periods, marketers can more acutely target travelers based on their needs – the right dates, the right lengths of stay, the right room types and much more. Hoteliers can then compare the success of promotions to their competitors inside and outside of the market and the traditional comp set.

Top‐of‐funnel data helps hoteliers better understand how they’re positioned across all the various booking channels as compared to the lodging businesses they compete with, whether those are traditional hotels or alternative accommodations.

And with the increased adoption of cloud computing, this data can be accessed in real time. No longer are revenue teams waiting for daily or weekly reports, they can access the data they need at any minute of any day.

With very little pace and pickup visibility, hoteliers today are struggling to nail down a remotely accurate forecast. By starting with top‐of‐funnel data and then building a strategy around capturing those guests, tweaking promotions and measuring conversion, hoteliers can ensure they are capturing a fair share of whatever demand might be coming into the market today, as well as preparing for demand spikes when they inevitably return.