Making any decisions at your hotel, big or small, should be based on accurate and relevant data. Having a CRM robust with different hotel reports will give you the tools you need to track your properties performance, help you forecast future revenue, while watching for opportunities to build more group business. Small details make up the big picture and knowing what reports you have on hand will be handy in staying informed, all the time.
Continue reading to find out what 7 key hotel reports that hoteliers should be drawing on to track and improve sales while staying competitive in the market.
1 - Hotel Sales Activity Report
Tracking sales activity across the hotels in your portfolio is an important and big task. Thank the heavens for modern CRM tools that make this easy! Group bookings are slowly returning as the pandemic is winding down with many hotels seeing an increase in group sales heading into Q4 of 2021 and expecting this trend to continue making these hotel reports essential to keep handy.
The hotel sales activity report lets you track the day-to-day inputs of your sales team. You can see whose most productive, which activities are most effective in landing group business, and where in the sales cycle they may be falling short.
When shopping for a hotel CRM, look for one that allows customization in your sales reports. Other important sales activities to track are:
- Quantity of outgoing emails and sales calls for lead generation
- Inbound emails and sales calls
- Follow-up calls
- Lead response times
- Length of time spent on calls
- Deadlines and completion dates
With the hotel activity report handy, managers can see when a sales person isn’t managing their time effectively and offer coaching to improve their productivity. These reports also highlight when a team isn’t meeting specific quotas, like outgoing sales calls to regional businesses per day/week/month or the number of confirmed group contracts a quarter. With detailed notes and the ability to pinpoint areas that may be lacking in the sales process, managers are able to support sales team members, refine their sales tactics and collaborate on new strategies for specific clients when appropriate.
Reports are only as accurate as the information that is entered in them. So remember: coach your sales team and hold them accountable to consistently entering their data accurately and on time.
2 - Hotel Pace Report
A hotel pace report compares the total amount of bookings from a given period to another given period. These hotel reports also help managers compare different data collected at different times in the year compared to previous years and to give them better insight on sales trends year over year.
Managers can compare month, quarter, year or beyond. This is an essential report for day-to-day hotel management because of its many benefits:
- Projecting staffing needs: Knowing exactly when you’re busy and slow will allow you to staff accurately and accordingly so that you don’t become understaffed or overstaffed (both of which are costly to your property).
- Track room demand: Having insight into your weekly, monthly, and seasonal demand, you’ll be able to adjust room rates and optimize RevPAR. For example, a specific property in your portfolio may have an unforeseen spike in room demand during an annual conference held 50 km away. As a result, some of the attendees were willing to commute to the conference to save money. The opportunity presents itself here as a challenge to raise rates without pricing yourself out of the niche demand.
- Identify sales areas of opportunity: compare guest room bookings over a certain period of time to discover sales opportunities. Ie: if you identify that hockey teams book room blocks in the winter and event space bookings are light during that same period, think about marketing your meeting space at a discount to those groups. Maybe the hockey team would like a company dinner event post-game for example.
Another thing to note: increased booking pace for rooms isn’t always better. For example, maybe you sell out of rooms in advance over a certain period that usually experiences high-value, last minute bookings from a SMERF segment. These Pace reports can help you to identify and flag these hot periods so that sales can cool off on this time-frame until the time is appropriate.
3 - Win/Loss Report
If you want to understand why certain groups prefer specific hotel properties, what customer segments require high-touch service, and any sales messaging issues, then these reports should be reviewed regularly. Here are examples of both positive and negative things that win/loss reports can reveal about the hotels across your portfolio:
1 - Hotels consistently winning group business for corporate meetings because of world-class A/V capabilities
2 - Select-service hotels losing out on groups business because of the lack of F&B options
3 - Repeat event and group business from a mid-size company at a specific property
To be able to gain an accurate picture, sales people must outline the exact reasons as to why they lost or won the group business. The more details the better. From there, you can continue to work with your sales teams to improve strategies catered to these trends. The goal is to align hotel offerings with guests needs. This helps you to streamline improvements across properties and implement the changes where it makes the most sense.
Keep it positive and authentic, letting them know your goal is better aligning hotel offerings with guest needs.
This information can help you prioritize improvements across properties, and implement changes where it makes the most sense. Based on the examples above, these are some possible strategic responses:
- Implement the same level of A/V capabilities at properties that aren’t winning as many company meetings because there is a local market for them
- Create package meal menus and grab-and-go breakfast options at select-service properties near convention sites
- Prioritize high-touch service for these loyal group customers
4 - Group Rooms Control (GRC) Report
Competition for group business is always high and this is a trend that won’t be changing any time soon. The GRC report is essential for your sales team to be able to stay up to date on open room blocks across your portfolio of hotels.
These hotel reports help track reserved and finalized room blocks in the current month or upcoming months. With this data handy, your sales team will be able to create detailed, timely and accurate responses to RFPs which helps land business - it’s about the quality of your response and how quickly you respond.
Over a period of time, GRC reports can provide data on actualized room-nights for group business and long-term patterns and trends. Maybe you observe a steep drop-off between tentative bookings and actualized bookings during a specific period. This may prompt a closer look to your win/loss period for a dig deeper into why.
5 - Event Summary Report
The Event Summary Report is kind of like the GRC report, except it’s an overview of your events - actualized, current, and future. These hotel reports come in handy to prevent unintentional double-bookings while also keeping teams aligned for event coordination preparation of things like A/V setup, special requests, F&B needs and adequate staffing. This is key to streamline events and provide outstanding guest service, which is significant in keeping repeat groups. Like the GRC reports, hotel managers can review past event summaries and spot opportunities for improvement, and wins to double down on.
6 - Comp Set Report
It’s important to understand where you lie among your competitors. The comp-set report allows you to track your direct competitors and see how they are performing, the amenities on offer, room rates and upcoming asset management projects like property upgrades and renovations. Through analyzing the comp set, you can approximately pinpoint the marketing position of each property.
What makes a hotel your competitor isn’t necessarily its proximity. A limited service hotel isn’t a direct competitor with a five star hotel across the street. Competition criteria is typically set on factors such as service level, meeting space (type, quality, size), amenities and quantity of rooms.
To further research your comp set, use Google, TripAdvisor and other OTAs to see what your competitors are offering. Categorize your research by season and you may observe that your property outperforms them at certain times of the year, and see where you fall behind on others. Things to consider for your comparison analysis:
- Market penetration
- Group bookings
- revPAR
- Events
- Online reviews and engagement
In today’s hospitality landscape, comp sets are changing more frequently because the competition is always upgrading and changing things up. Do your analysis at least once a year and track on an ongoing basis.
7 - Post-Event Surveys
These reports aren’t just the domain of event planners and coordinators, they’re a great resource for hoteliers and managers too. These surveys can give you insight on how to improve your event offerings and group sales. Keep the surveys brief and simple and preface the survey with how long it will take (anything more than 2 minutes result in low-participation). You can also incentivize people to participate by offering coupons or entries for a raffle. Using a modern, cloud-based survey software like Typeform will be useful because it also includes a percentage of completion progress bar so attendees will know you value their time. Consider these questions if you’re wondering what to ask:
- Was the staff helpful with your needs?
- Was the pre-event communication clear?
- Was the communication clear during the event?
- What would your ate the booking process for room blocks (1:difficult - 10:easy)
- Were you satisfied with the event space?
- Were issues solved quickly?
- Were issues solved effectively?
After reviewing the reports, you’ll be able to identify opportunities for improvement and address issues promptly and action out for the next event.
The hotel reports section of your CRM can easily be overlooked when you’re busy running the day-to-day but these are significant tools that can help you make decisions on short and long term strategies, budgets and training decisions. Robust reporting isn’t a feature you want collecting dust on the shelf!
