Winning your customer’s hearts and trust at the starting line does not guarantee their loyalty. No business wants to lose a customer, there is no rocket science to that. Plus, it is ridiculously expensive to convert a new customer instead of retaining one, around 5x to 25x more expensive to be specific. The customers who come back eventually become the “living proof” of reliable and trustworthy referrals.

Customer retention has never been an easy task, especially in the hospitality industry.

Loyal customers are worth so much more than one-time customers and have an array of benefits in the long run. Better customer retention can help you focus more on your strengths and less on your weaknesses. Customer retention isn’t easy, but it can be made simpler with some strategies and tactics in CiHMS’s today blog.

Social media – the understatement

In the hospitality industry, it’s a given that your customers are going to need some help from you now and then. Whether it’s making a reservation for their next stay or simply asking for directions, your guests will always be looking for ways to make their stay better.

The best way to ensure that your customers get what they need is by providing them with exceptional customer service. However, here’s the thing: most people don’t know exactly what they want until they have it. This is why keeping an eye on your customers can be so important — it allows you to see when their needs change so that you can adjust accordingly.

Social media is a great tool for communicating with guests because it gives them the ability to reach out at any time of day or night. You can use social media to answer questions about travel plans, and check-in procedures and even give recommendations for local restaurants and attractions! Social media is a key tool in customer retention. It enables companies to build relationships with their customers by engaging with them and promoting loyalty programs, special offers, and improved customer service.

Social media has steadily grown in importance as a retention tool over the past decade, with more than two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) now saying they believe social media is “critical” for generating loyalty, as customers are expecting quick responses. Millennials have even higher expectations of the responding rate at 10 minutes, while others expect answers within 60 minutes time span. Social media has become the 1-800 helpline, apparently.

Communicating with your customer via social media helps to close the gap and build a much stronger relationship voluntarily without noticing.

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs help you keep the customers you already have by encouraging them to continue doing business with your hotel. Here are some of the ways these programs can benefit your hotel:

Reward repeat customers:

Loyalty programs are a great way to reward frequent guests and encourage them to return. For example, if you have a rewards program where guests earn points for every dollar spent, those who visit frequently will have a larger point balance than someone who visits only once or twice a year. Loyalty has been proven to increase repeat business. According to an article on PhocusWire, a loyalty program powered by technology, such as a hotel app, can be a big incentive for guests coming back, provided that it is designed in such a way that it offers real value, provided real-time information and guests can choose the rewards they want right on the system.

Loyalty programs also help encourage guests to book direct instead of through OTAs:

“Hotels are losing market share because of the rise in Airbnb and other vacation rental sites,” says Jeff Katz, president, and CEO of TravelClick, a provider of hotel marketing technology solutions. “They need to get more efficient and focus more on return guests.” Loyalty programs help encourage guests to book direct instead of through OTAs (online travel agencies). In fact, loyalty programs have been shown to increase direct bookings by as much as 40%. The key is making it as easy as possible for guests to enroll and then use their rewards points or free stays at any time during their next stay with your brand — whether they’ve already traveled with you before or not. Booking through your hotel’s website instead of using OTAs like Expedia or Hotels.com helps you save money on commissions and ensures that all profits from reservations go straight into your pocket (instead of being split between the OTA and your hotel). Furthermore, when guests book directly with the hotel instead of through an OTA, they tend to spend more money on amenities during their stay—and this extra spending adds up over time!

A loyalty program will help build a personal connection with guests.

Having a loyalty program shows customers that they’re valued members of your community—and this can make them feel more connected to your brand as well as more receptive toward marketing efforts like email campaigns or special offers on social media sites.

Analyzing available guest data to serve the guest

Why does this matter? As the customer journey becomes more complex, it is essential to ensure that each interaction builds on the previous one and contributes to the overall experience. This requires data collection and sharing across multiple channels. By leveraging guest data, hotels can make sure that their guests will have a personalized experience based on their individual habits and tastes which will satisfy them and increase customer loyalty.

Using guest feedback to improve your hotel’s overall service quality

After every stay, you can ask your guests to fill out a survey. The feedback you get will help you understand the needs and expectations of your clientele and can help improve the service quality at your hotel.

Using guest preferences to personalize their next visit

If you have a loyalty program in place, it’s time to use it! You can create personalized offers based on what guests like most about your hotel and what they want more of during their next stay. This way, you’ll be able to personalize the offer for each customer and increase their retention rate by offering exactly what they want.

The loyalty program encourages customers to preferably choose to stay at your hotel on the next visit if they have had great experiences in their previous stays.

Personalized marketing campaigns based on customer behavior

After analyzing how customers interact with your hotel website or app, it’s possible for brands to identify different types of visitors using this information as input for their marketing strategy. For example, if customers are browsing through multiple pages on the website but don’t make any purchases, this might mean that they need more information about what makes staying at your hotel unique in order for them to convert.

Integrating new technologies

Incorporating new technologies into your guest experience is a powerful way to increase customer retention. While some hoteliers are hesitant to embrace technology and go on their digital transformation journey, especially given the high price of hospitality management solutions, those who do use these tools often report that they deliver a high ROI, and pay for themselves in just a few years.

Hoteliers have seen tremendous success with virtual reality and augmented reality technologies like VR headsets and interactive displays, offering guests greater personalization, and in-depth immersive experiences with extraordinarily memorable experiences, such as a quick hotel tour, a sneak peek at the neighborhood attractions, etc.

Thanks to modern technology, hotels can be able to create extraordinary guest experiences for customers during their stay.

Integrating AI-powered chatbots has also proven to be an effective method of improving the customer experience and increasing retention rates. Marriott has rolled out a Marriott Rewards Chatbots chatbot. It works on Facebook Messenger as well as Amazon Alexa devices in multiple languages, and handles simple questions about hotel amenities or provides information about the local area. It can also use predictive intelligence in order to offer recommendations about restaurants or tourist attractions based on user preferences; this helps it create more personalized engagements with guests. In addition to that, Marriott had introduced the ChatBotlr butler robot to help out guests in the lobby. These changes had helped Marriotts not only leverage the labor shortage—the ongoing issue within the hospitality industry itself but also enable Marriotts to respond to their customers’ needs in time.

Following Marriott’s footsteps, a concierge robot name Connie was put into work at Hilton. Based on IBM’s Watson AI platform for natural language processing, Connie was made to reduce wait line time, maximize hotel employees’ work performances, and above all create unique touch and surprise the guests.

The hospitality industry is in a period of great change post-pandemic, and it is important to keep up with new technologies and trends. It’s no secret that the hotel sector faces new challenges every day—new customer expectations, new competition, and the need to adapt in order to thrive. The hotel industry has always been about providing service for guests but with an increasingly competitive marketplace, there’s a need for every hotel to make sure that it’s doing everything possible to serve its guests well. This means providing customers with the kind of high-quality service they’ve come to expect from their hotels. Hotels that provide excellent customer service are more likely to retain loyal customers, which can help them build strong customer relationships and increase business growth. In order to achieve such, investing in a powerful hospitality management solution, like CiHMS is absolutely a must to automate all hotel daily operations, optimize your revenue and maximize staff’s performances, to help hoteliers have the time to focus on the customers. To learn and explore more about CiHMS, contact our team for a detailed consultancy and the best solution that fit your own business model.

Customer retention is one of the most important issues facing hoteliers today, and it’s one that they need to take seriously. If they want to survive, they must make customer retention a priority. Customer retention is not a glamorous concept—it calls for hard work, consistent communication, and loyalty on behalf of the entire team. If hotels don’t plan their customer retention strategies carefully and persevere with them, this process will become a monumental burden for the hotel in question.

According to the analytic statistics from Google Destination Insights, a remarkable increase in International search volume for Vietnam tourism has increased by 75% for the first quarter of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021. This proves the tourism industry is on the rise and shall become one of the leading industries economically domestically, signaling such positive impacts on the hotel sectors after enduring a major crisis of the pandemic. Welcoming the tourists back questions hoteliers to consider tweaking and transforming their current operations model to adapt to the new normal circumstance.

A sudden increase in international searches for Vietnam tourism confirms hoteliers to get ready to welcome international guests back soon. Statistics generated from Google Destination Insights.

Hotel operations: the concept

Hotel operations include organizing, managing, and arranging all-around hotel activities from human resources to revenue management, and hotel checklists. Running hotel operations effectively is not an easy job, it is the fundamental key to having a successful hotel and required hoteliers to know their business inside and out, be good at problem-solving and work under high pressure for a period of time.

How to improve your hotel operations

As the digital technologies have more advanced rapidly than ever before, to catch up with the evolution, the traditional hotel operations model is no longer applied. The overwhelmed front desks, endless housekeeping requests coming in constantly, in-room services on standby with the ongoing labor shortages, all trigger hoteliers to seek the optimal hospitality management solution in order to patch up the empty labor force, speed up the conversion rate, and improve revenue efficiently.

Manual paperwork still exists in traditional hotel operations, it slows down the entire system unexpectedly.

The indispensable hospitality management solution – CiHMS

CiHMS is the leading cloud-based hospitality management solution on the market, that advances your hotel operations and drive your total revenue at its full capacity. This hotel PMS serves as the centralized system, empowering hoteliers to perform day-to-day functions, and manage crucial administrative tasks and reservations. The system enables hotels to streamline processes within departments in real-time, synchronize simultaneously and monitor hotel operations status at ease.

Integrated with a Central Reservation System, CiHMS handles all bookings and reservations across all distribution channels, automatically generates detailed reports for hoteliers to keep up with the hotel operations in real-time, updates room status and occupancy rate in order to strategically come up with a business pricing strategy in time, striving to maximize your revenue. CiHMS is also integrated with a Distribution Channel Manager to connect your booking system with hundreds of OTA channels globally. Synchronize room rate, allotments, and availabilities across the platform, avoiding unnecessary human data entry errors.

The powerful hospitality management solution, like CiHMS, has everything your hotels have been looking for in terms of operations. It automates the daily operations procedures such as pre-check-in, check-out through the mobile app, submitting and processing customers’ requests right on the system, delegates and distributes tasks automatically to help you and hotel employees to focus on your guests.

Mobile devices in hotel operations

According to the statistics from Digital Vietnam 2021 by We Are Social và Hootsuite, Internet Users in Vietnam have increased to 551,000 users between 2020 and 2021. With the current growth rate, it is much easier to approach potential customers through Digital Marketing, such as applying social media networks trends in hospitality marketing strategy.

Look out for the latest social media trends to capture and convert all your potential customers without spending a lump sum on advertising.

When your hotel operations run at full capacities, the workloads resulting from these operations shall escalate, and data storage is expanding by the minute. Manually performing tasks and procedures will no longer make sense. It only creates chaos with unavoidable human errors, unable to update the current workload’s status, seemingly losing track of management. Those are a few of the originated reasons for the introduction of cloud-computing technology in hospitality.

Thanks to this technology, hotels can access and update directly on the hotel management system right from their mobile devices, whenever and wherever they are. With the conveniences, portability, and extremely friendly user interface, hotel employees can even check-in / check-out for guests as needed. All changes are synchronized immediately, easily interact with guests, enhance their experiences tremendously, engage customer trust and strengthen your brand reputation. This also gives such a professional vibe, builds customers’ loyalty genuinely, and effortlessly promotes your guests coming back for a future stay.

Cybersecurity in hospitality

Many hoteliers have underestimated the importance of this matter. Cybersecurity has become the most critical challenge for the hospitality industry in this modern era. Due to the characteristics of the hotel sector, a great deal of travelers’ personal data is involved regularly, and guests have occurred to question the privacy protection policy at any hotel they visit, especially regarding their transaction information. Apart from credit card leakage, cybersecurity frauds go as far as WiFi network’s security being compromised. Taking advantage of lacking cybersecurity, attackers can gain access to all guest’s private devices, such as mobiles, laptops, tablets, etc.

Cybersecurity issues have constantly alerted hoteliers to take this into consideration seriously.

Even the big chain hotels like Hilton, Marriot, and Trump Hotel had confronted the attacks not once, but multiple times. These damages hotels financially outrageously and their brands horribly. For the recent attack, Marriot had to pay a fine of 18.4 million British pounds for losing over 500 million guests’ data worldwide. It alerts hotels to start taking cybersecurity seriously, then how to ensure to protect your guests’ data discreetly and store them tightly secured? Join our April Webinar with the topic on DATA PRIVACY PROTECTION IN THE HOTEL SECTOR, live at 10 am on April 21st, 2022. Register now at this link to hear the experts’ opinions and recommendations on this issue.

Based on the latest research of the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), the sudden drop of 49.1% in the global tourism venue in 2020, make up for a loss of 4,5 trillion US dollars, projected to rise 31.7% for the year 2022 as the results of re-opening borders for tourisms ever since the epidemic broke out. Although the traditional hotel operations might still work occasionally, they might not maximize hotel capacities while the tourism industry resumes its high peak. Is it worth sticking to the old school? Or be brave and ride the new trend with the cloud-based hospitality management solution like any other hotel? The solution “grows you grow” with great flexibility and ridiculously functional while staying exceptionally convenient. CiHMS – the only cloud computing hospitality management solution you don’t want to miss. Contact our team for a demo and unlock your property’s full potential.

The technology revolution had allowed the hospitality industry to evolve and transform completely from their traditional operation model into a personalized seamless customer-oriented experience, starting right when the customer journey begins. The epidemic has sped up the implementation process as well as the intervention of customers’ acceptance, opening a new chapter of the contactless era in hospitality. A digital check-in has become a new normal, an imperative in complying with the strict hygiene and distance regulations post COVID-19 while allowing hotels to understand their customers’ preferences pre-arrival.

Pre-check-in allows hotels to comply with strict COVID-19 regulations on distances and hygiene while making customers feel safe and secure.

How does pre-check-in actually work? Why isn’t pre-check-in frequently offered enough? Are you planning to introduce this technology to your property? Let’s cut the queue and dive down into what this technology is really made of.

The ultimate guide to hotel pre-check-in

Hotel Pre-check-in, what is it?

Pre-check-in allows the hotel guests to proceed with their check-in process on their mobile devices prior to their arrival. Hotels usually activate the pre-check-in functionality on their app 24 hours ahead.

Hotels can activate pre-check-in functionality on their app 24hrs ahead.

Pre-check-in is the latest feature developed for our CiHMS Guest App, a part of our CiHMS PMS. We specially designed this functionality to simplify the checking-in process for staff while offering guests the flexibility to handle the check-in in whichever way they indulge.

Guests have to fill in their contact details, their reservation information and provide personal identification documents. A full-face selfie can be mandatory for verification, it automatically syncs this data to the guest profile on the hotel’s database and enables guests’ facial recognition as soon as they arrive at the lobby.

Depending on the hotel’s preferences and policies, guests can also select the desired vacant hotel room, early check-in or late check-out request, luggage storage payment, other added-value hotel packages such as spas, meals, city tours, etc. A medical declaration can be submitted in this process by attaching your vaccine passports or government-approved vaccination documents (green card certification issued by PC Covid).

Your guests can submit their medical declaration right on your hotel app thanks to the latest Pre-check-in feature.

Once completing the check-in procedure, guests may receive their room’s number and digital room key right on their app’s confirmational screen, or choose to pick up their room key physical card at the front desks. Many hotels prefer not to offer guests room numbers until they physically make it to the lobby, in order to give flexibility to their rooms’ allotments.

What are the benefits of pre-check-in?

Your guests just love it

A Data-Driven Look at Hospitality’s Recovery in 2020 report had shown 71% of consumers are more likely to stay in a hotel offering self-service tech. Imagine after the long commute to your destination, the last thing you would want to do is get in line and do all the paperwork onsite. Not ideal for anyone in particular. Say goodbye to the long busy waiting queue at the front desk, get instant access to the hotel room upon arrival. It’s definitely convenient.

Online check-in gives guests the freedom and comfort of checking in at their own pace.

Hotel staff adores it

The pre-check-in reduces the administrative workload for the front desk staff tremendously, much faster with group pre-check-in. A pre-check-in functionality integrated into your hotel PMS, like CiHMS deliver reliable automation, smooth synchronization, and alleviate labor shortage issue with delightful traveler’s experiences. Guests are asked to provide their expected arrival time, which allows hotels to better plan and allocate hotel staff’s availability to welcome guests.

Improving customer relationship

As the pre-check-in has done the majority of the work, like collecting guests’ ID, contact details, booking information, etc., your staff can focus on connecting with the customers at a much higher level, taking time to actually understand their personal needs and expectations, overall, better cater to your guests with exceptional comfort.

A great way to upsell or cross-sell

Guests might be skeptical during the booking process where they often compare prices, features, hotel services before making the final decision. However, they are most inclined to purchase a room upgrade, spa treatments, city tours, pick-up service, set meals closer to their arrival date. The decision-making can proceed much faster at home rather than at the busy front desk.

Social distancing compliance boosts guest confidence

Pre-check-in is the perfect solution to keep your hotel in check with the social distancing regulations. It limits physical person-to-person interaction to a minimum, making guests feel safe and secure. Hotels might integrate contactless/cashless payment or facial recognition technology to take this up a notch. With a cloud-based hospitality management solution like CiHMS, this can easily be done.

With Pre-check-in, guests may proceed cashless payment with facial recognition technology integrated right on the hotel app.

Any disadvantages to putting into reconsideration

Less human contact and interaction

While the advantage of pre-check-in is allowing guests to feel safe and secure by avoiding physical contact with hotel staff altogether, it can’t help create the invisible untouchable personal bubble surrounding guests throughout their stays. For business travelers, things can be tough as they have been used to communicating and exchanging stories with hotel employees on their trips in the past. Many would prefer the traditional check-in process, as they truly enjoy human interaction.

Unstable internet connection

Similar to any hospitality contactless technology, it is required to have sufficient good quality internet coverage across your properties. Otherwise, the cloud computing hospitality management solution won’t be synchronized and unable to work properly. Making sure no internet disruption and an outage is significantly important in implementing pre-check-in technology.

New software investment and comprehensive training for the front desk

Your current hospitality management might not offer pre-check-in functionality, merely because they haven’t started with the development yet. Looking out for a new pre-check-in software installation might be messy, expensive, and simply insufficient for your current hotel operations at the moment. Leveraging whether this upgraded feature is worth the process.

Should you or should you not?

Pre-arrival is an essential touchpoint in the customers’ journey. It happens to be the first impression guests have of your hotel even before they get there. Offering guests, a pre-check-in service shows your efforts and intentions in delivering complete customer satisfaction and tapping in personalized customers’ experiences proactively.

Hospitality is known for its competitiveness, if you fail to keep up with the comparable competitors in the area offering the latest technology there is, most likely, your guests will choose them over you in a heartbeat. Being a highly customer-centric industry, adopting innovative technologies to deliver experiences that your customers are happy with, as their demands grow. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, pre-check-in technology allows the hospitality industry to embrace safety measures to protect guests from any unexpected harmful threat while comfortably enjoying their stays.

It might surprise you how easy it is to get started with pre-check-in. There is a wide range of hospitality management solutions offering this feature as an added feature in their system. Ask your hotel PMS providers for this option, or contact our team to book a demo to discover the possibilities of contactless pre-check-in for your hotels.

The new normal has been shaking up everyone’s daily life routines in one way or another. It also altered our perceptions, habits, and behaviors toward direct human interaction distinctively. On the brink of recovery post-pandemic, contactless technology appears to be favorable by both hoteliers and guests as a vigorous effort in reducing the underlying risk of germs exposures while delivering highly personalized guests experiences.

With the innovative contactless technology, hotel guests are capable of going full-on “contactless mode” throughout their customer’s journeys. Hoteliers can eliminate the excessive sanitizing protocols aligning to COVID-19 compliance standards, and avoid invading their guests’ safety zone unintentionally. It creates a truly seamless digital experience throughout the entire guests’ journey. Does that sound familiar? Did it ring any bell? You might have guessed it right. All of those depict the smart hotel model in action, which we had briefly touched on in our previous blog here. In today’s blog, we would like to go under the technology and reveal to you the actual things that make all the contactless experiences possible.

The innovative contactless technology forays into hospitality can enhance guest experiences up a notch.

The Kiosk chaos

To prevent human contact upon arrival, many hotels had introduced self-check-in kiosks available at the front desk, without knowing how much it would add up. The kiosk itself is gradually turning into a constant cleaning station for the hoteliers to take care of, becomes the main concern for guests as soon as they arrive, such as who was using the kiosk before them, the time interval in between two cleaning sessions, did they come right before the cleaning session started or ended. Before you know it, the long check-in queue starts to jeopardize your lobby’s operations.

Self-check-in kiosks might have been a breakthrough technology a decade ago, but are no longer a surprise in today’s practice. We can easily find all types of self-help, self-booking, self-payment kiosks in airports, hospitals, museums, amusement parks, zoos, malls, and so on. These kiosks can be a pain for maintenance and require quite a decent budget to invest.

Check-in Digitally – Room Card goes Keyless

The majority of hotel guests are actively on their smartphones, why don’t hotels take advantage of this? That means building a mobile app for your guests to not only book directly with your hotels but can also check-in through it. Better yet, have their room key digitalized and send it to their phone right after they completed the check-in process.

Hotel check-in counter might no longer be necessary. Guests can proceed with their check-in through the mobile app, and get the access key right automatically.

Hmm, hold on! What if your hotel was built before such technology even existed? The reconstruction is not ideal at the moment but going keyless is still your goal? Check out OpenKey. It’s as easy as plug-and-play. Without replacing your lock, OpenKey supports different types of locking systems. If your locks aren’t listed, just contact their support team for further modifications. OpenKey is quick and extremely affordable. It’s the best option to go keyless fast and easy.

CiHMS Hospitality Guest App for the rescue

We have your back, our CiHMS clients! Once your guests complete the check-in process which can be done right on their phone, a digital key shall be sent via the Guest App and easily accessible 24/7 anywhere they go at their fingertip. No more plastic room keys to carry around and less trouble worrying about losing it.

Digital keys can allow guests to enter the common lobby, lounge, elevator, spa, and more. Hoteliers receive reports on their guests’ experience, acknowledge their preferences better, understand their behaviors, and get to serve them better in their future stays. It cuts down on the paperwork, documentation, and efforts of your staff. Your hotels can skip the front desk if you want to. Afraid your lobby might end up looking empty? It’s a great location for juice bars, shops, florists, or any retail that fits your hotel’s concept.

Beyond the digital experience

Meanwhile, hoteliers get to enjoy more perks with CiHMS Guest App and the CiHMS hotel PMS than just that. Housekeeping, room services, and laundry requests from your guests can be filed directly on the app and sync in real-time. Engaging with your guests through the app to receive feedback and ensure your hotels provide their requests in a timely manner.

A robust PMS would help hotels to transform their operations

Instead of dining in the restaurant down in the lobby, guests are now ordering fancy in-room dining through the app. The food shall be delivered to your room by robots with a ping on your phone when they arrive at the door or simply set out in the hall if guests are not willing to be in contact directly with the hotel staff.

Many have thought the contactless experience in a hotel would never make it here to stay, then hey, here came the pandemic. We realize hotels will never be the same again, at least before the pandemic. The recent COVID-19 outbreak has been the catalyst in boosting the hospitality digital transformation at full speed. It makes us – the hospitality geeks – appreciate the change and be aware of our customers’ constant shift in behavior. At CiHMS, we unravel the complication for our clients with the powerful cloud computing hospitality management solution integrated with numerous hospitality modules and guest apps to meet your hotel needs while making your customers happy. If you haven’t checked out CiHMS yet, contact our team and get your demo today. The contactless era is here, and are you ready yet? Indeed, we are.

The hotel business performance is measured and reflected in the revenue management indicators. Continuing the previous article about “The revenue management metrics every hotel owner needs to know (Part 1)”, we will go through the remaining 06 key revenue management metrics.

7. Direct Revenue Ratio – DRR (Direct Revenue Ratio)

What is Direct Sales DRR?

DRR is the index that shows the percentage of revenue coming from direct bookings such as website, phone, emails compared to the total revenue. The commission for third parties might affect your revenue and profits by around 40 percent.

DRR formula:

(Revenue from direct bookings) ÷ (Total revenue) x 100 =% DRR

Example:

In a month, your hotel generates $40,000 in revenue. The revenue comes from direct booking is $20,000, the DRR is calculated as follows:

DRR = $20,000 in direct bookings ÷ $40,000 of total revenue x 100% = 50%

How to improve DRR

• Encourage loyal guests

Keep a record of guests who have stayed at the hotel and occasionally offer them special offers. It will encourage guests to book you directly for their future visits.

• Use social media

Create a social networking site for your hotel to reach potential customers directly. Social media such as Facebook and Instagram are powerful tools to promote your hotel and make it easy for guests to contact you directly. 

• Direct booking privileges

To boost direct booking, you want to give your guests the privilege when they book directly with you. Free airport transfer, early check-in, late check-out, complimentary drinks, F&B discount, and so on are some of the offers you can give to direct booking guests.

8. Evaluate hotel comp sets

Research and evaluate your competitors are essential, no matter which industry you are in. By identifying groups of direct competitors, you can contrast and reference the potential of competitors.

Identify your competitors

You can determine your group of direct competitors by the following factors:

• Your position:

Positioning your hotel in the industry is the first step to identify your direct competitors. What types of accommodation facilities do you offer? How big are they? Who are their target customers? Answering those questions would help you identify your position and direct competitors. 

• Your services:

As well as positioning your hotel in the marketplace, you can identify competitors base on the products and services you provide. 

Market analysis

Once you know your competitors, the next step is to compare and analyze the market in which you are.

Step 1: Identify the group of competitors

Step 2: Assess your strengths and weaknesses

Step 3: Enhance improvement and development

Put yourself in the shoes of guests to get their standards and expectations from you and your competitors.

9. Marketing Cost Per Booking – MCPB

What is the marketing cost per booking?

The MCPB is the metric that measures the costs needed to attract new guests. With this metric, not only do you know how much it will cost you to get guests, but you also evaluate the effectiveness of your branding campaigns.

How to calculate MCPB?

The first step is to find out from which channels that your guests use to find your hotel. Calculating your average cost per acquisition can be simple, but here’s an equation to get started:

For each campaign or channel, subtract the total marketing cost from its total revenue.

This will help you figure out which channels are working well, and which are not.

10. Tripadvisor rating

Tripadvisor is one of the most popular reviews and rating sites in the hospitality and tourism industry. The voice of guests has the power and affects your hotel rating and booking.

How to increase reviews on Tripadvisor

Before you learn how to improve your ranking position on TripAdvisor, the first step is to get lots of customer reviews.

1. Create an Amazing Guest Experience
   One of the most fundamental things about getting a good review is that you provide the best experience. You have to deliver an experience, service that is beyond your guests’ expectations, so they want to share their incredible experiences with others.
2. Encourage guests to write reviews
   You want to encourage guests to leave a review about how they feel about their stay. You can ask guests to write reviews upon check-out, or you can send a thank-you email with a link to your TripAdvisor review page.

How to improve your ranking on Tripadvisor

Notice that reviews and ratings about your hotel on Tripadvisor do not always match. For example, you can get many good reviews but your hotel rating is not on top. Here’s the algorithm Tripadvisor is using:

• Latest Reviews:

Make sure you have new reviews on Tripadvisor regularly. The more recent reviews, the more trustworthy they are for potential customers. Outdated reviews are not valuable to your hotel.

• Review Score:

How positive are your reviews? Of course, when considering your Tripadvisor ranking, the strength of reviews will be taken into account. Keep impressing your guests.

• The Volume of Reviews:

How many reviews do you have? The more reviews you have, the more potential guests have to judge you. Keep encouraging guests to leave a review. Furthermore, regularly engage and respond to bad reviews to improve your reputation.

Booking.com – one of the world’s largest booking and review sites

11. Reviews on Booking.com

Booking.com – a platform of reviews, ratings, and reservations

Founded in 1996, Booking.com is now one of the world’s largest booking and review sites. Guests can write reviews and book rooms on a single platform. Therefore, Booking.com has a huge impact on hotels around the world.

How to increase your Booking.com reviews?

There are 02 steps to get more reviews: create a guest experience that is beyond expectations and encourage guests to write reviews by the end of their stay. In particular, if your guests booked through Booking.com then you do not want to miss their reviews. So how can you improve your ranking on Booking.com?

Booking.com allows guests to search for hotels according to their preferences such as hotels with swimming pools, spa services, etc. Therefore, you should always update your hotel amenities and facilities on Booking.com. This will help your ranking position in more searches.

According to Booking.com the best way to improve search ranking is keeping your page up to date. As long as your page is up to date and relevant to the guests you are targeting, then you should rank well in their searches.

12. Guest Satisfaction

Guest satisfaction – one of the most important metrics that you must pay attention to. There are several factors to take into account when measuring guest satisfaction. However, two main factors affect guest satisfaction:

• Essential services

You are providing essential services to customers: a place to eat & a place to sleep. The hotel is the guests’ second home. Therefore, you must make sure your hotel is clean, safe, and comfortable.

• Friendly staffs

Another factor that affects guest satisfaction in the hotel industry is the hotel staff. The staff’s welcoming and smiles are the first impressions of a guest. 

How to measure guests satisfaction

It is simple to know how satisfied your customers are: You can encourage them to write a review about their stay (on Tripadvisor, Booking.com, etc.). Or you can send them a survey via email or upon check-out.

How to improve guest satisfaction

There are many ways you can do to enhance your guest experience. A personalized experience such as a romantic couple room décor or a birthday cake, or even a hand-writing welcome note can impress your guests and give them a warm feeling.

2020 was a year with many challenges for the hospitality industry. Knowing 12 key hotel metrics is one of the ways to grow back in 2021. 

It is undeniable that OTA is one of the biggest channels to promote your hotel and contributes significant revenue for hotels. However, having your hotel bookings entirely depends on OTAs is not ideal as you have to pay commissions for each booking they deliver. When it comes to optimizing cost, it is essential to boost revenue from direct bookings.

Direct Bookings count when your guests book directly with you either via your website, phone call, or walk-in, without any other intermediaries.
So how should you boost direct bookings for your hotel? Here are a few tricks.

1. Optimize your hotel’s website

Put yourself in guests’ shoes to understand what drives them to make a booking decision. Guests may first discover your hotel via online channels, but they always at least check out your website, browsing for more information before making a reservation. So make sure your website provides the most accurate and attractive information about rooms and your hotels, and some good reviews would help. Your web doesn’t need to be excellent, over-the-roof, but a clean, simple, and eye-catching one to create a good impression.
The majority of travelers book their stay on mobile, so it’s essential to have a mobile-friendly website.
Next, optimize your website to rank on Google. It is not a one-day task, but you have to keep it up as you don’t want to lose to competitors.

2. Simplify the booking process
Try to narrow your booking process down to 3 steps, make it short & simple to reduce the opt-out rate. And it is best to learn from top online booking sites.

Also, make sure your reservation system supports multiple payment methods, as well as the ability to integrate with PMS.

3. Offer more values for guests
Guest experience is not a myth, and you should take good care of it. Travelers expect more and more from their stays. The loyalty program is one of the best ways to show you care about your guests. Offer loyalty programs when guests book directly with you, where they can earn points and redeem for services discount at your hotels.

4. Increase your hotel’s reputation
Good reviews can influence a traveler’s booking decision in a big way. On the 5-point rating scale, even just a 0.5 point makes a huge impact (for ex. from 3.5 to 4). So, it’s crucial to have a strategy to collect good reviews and smartly display them on your website. Handling bad reviews is also needed to be put on the plan. Wrong ways of handling bad reviews could result in more bad reviews or destroy your reputation.

5. Leverage the power of social media
Young travelers love their social media. Thanks to social media and the internet, traveling memories are sharing across the globe in an instant. And you want your hotel’s brand is in those moments. Have your guests share photos of your hotel rooms or tag your social account on their posts is the best media tactic one could ask for.

To manage your hotel effectively, here are the 12 key metrics that you need to understand. In the challenging year of 2021, improving the following 12 metrics is even more essential to growing your business.

1. Average Occupancy Rate – AOR

What is the AOR?

AOR is the percentage of occupied rooms compared to the total number of hotel rooms in a given period. The AOR is one of the most important indicators as it shows the hotels’ performance. The AOR index is the foundation to calculate the GOPPAR index. Ideally, the AOR should be 65% or more in a year.

AOR formula:

(Total number of rooms occupied) ÷ (Total number of available rooms) x 100 =% AOR

Example: 

In one month, your hotel has 65 rooms occupied out of 100. So, your AOR for that month will be:

65 used rooms ÷ 100 existing rooms = 65% AOR

How to improve the average occupancy?

• Special treats for returning guests

Collect and save your customer information to build a personalized experience, loyalty program to attract more returning guests. 

• Hotel chain

For business travelers, you can consider opening a hotel chain with properties in strategic locations. This tactic will diversify your brand.

• Special promotions

Create an exclusive offer for each targeted group of customers to attract them to your property.

2. Average Daily Rate – ADR

What is ADR?

ADR describes the average daily income per paid occupied room. ADR is used to measure the business performance of your hotel.

The formula for calculating ADR index: 

(Average room revenue earned) ÷ (Number of rooms booked) = ADR 

Example: If your hotel makes $20,000 in room revenue by booking out 200 rooms, then your ADR would be: $20,000 room revenue ÷ 200 rooms booked = $100 ADR

Note: When calculating ADR, do not include the formula for unpaid rooms, non-paid rooms for staff, etc.

How to improve ADR?

• Increase room rates

One of the simplest ways to improve your ADR is to increase room rates. However, you need to carefully consider the pricing strategy to come up with a reasonable increase.

• Focus on potential customers

OTA sites are great sources of information about potential customers who have a high ADR. Business travelers, for example, are often seen as high-value customers. Focus on attracting these customers would improve your ADR.

3. Revenue Per Available Room – RevPAR

What is the RevPAR Index?

RevPAR is one of the important metrics. This index shows the revenue per available room (both occupied and unoccupied rooms).

Difference between ADR and RevPAR:

The ADR only shows the revenue from occupied rooms, while RevPAR presents room revenues and hotel reservation rates. In other words, the RevPAR index shows a big picture of the actual room revenue performance based on the number of rooms of a hotel.

RevPAR formula:

Average daily rate (ADR) x Average occupancy rate (AOR) = RevPAR

Or

Room revenues ÷ Available rooms for sale = RevPAR

Example:

If you have 200 rooms, with an ADR average daily room rate of $ 100 and an average occupancy of 80%, total revenue is $ 16,000, RevPAR would be calculated like this:

$ 100 (ADR) x 80% (AOR) = $ 80 (RevPAR)

$ 16,000 (Room revenue) / 200 (Available Rooms) = $ 80 (RevPAR)

How to improve your RevPAR metrics?

• Adjust room rates based on market demand

To increase your RevPAR, you need to improve your ADR and AOR. You can decrease low-season room rates to increase your AOR and increase your room rates during the high season to boost your ADR, and overall improve your RevPAR.

• Discount offers

Different offers for different seasons or holidays are always attracting guests’ attention. Such as wedding packages including rooms and romantic dinners; or family packages for Christmas or summertime.

• Upselling strategy

One of the strategies to improve your RevPAR indicator effectively is upselling. You can provide other services such as breakfast in bed, room upgrades…Upselling not only encourages guests to spend more on your property but also leverages their experience.

4. Total Revenue Per Available Room – TrevPAR

What is TrevPAR?

If hotel-related KPIs are as diverse as they are numerous, then TRevPAR or total revenue per available room is the rainbow-flavored ice cream of performance metrics. TrevPAR shows the total revenue from every service brought to a hotel.

The difference between TrevPAR and RevPAR:

TrevPAR shows the total revenue from each guest stay, including services and purchases such as restaurants, spas, and bars. Meanwhile, RevPAR only shows the revenue from rent rooms.

TrevPAR formula:

(Total revenue) ÷ (Total number of available rooms) = TrevPAR

Example:

Let say you own a hotel with 30 rooms. Last month, total hotel revenue included dining, bar, and other services were $30000. The TrevPAR index is calculated as follow:

$ 30000 total revenue ÷ 30 rooms = $ 1000 TrevPAR

How to improve the TrevPAR indicator?

• Save guest profiles

Collect your guests’ information is essential for improving the guest experience and encouraging them to use more services during their stay. For example, information like traveling style, favorite room, favorite food, activities, special needs…By understanding your guests, you can deliver a better experience.

• Improve your services

The most obvious way to increase your TrevPAR index is to improve the services of your hotel. You want to make sure that the food is good, the spa is clean, and delivers exceptional services.

• Upselling strategy

You can apply an upselling strategy to the services that you offer in your hotel: special parking areas, room upgrades, spa packages, and so on.

5. Gross Operating Profit Per Available Room – GopPAR

What is the GopPAR?

GopPAR looks at the performance of your hotel via revenues and expenses. GopPAR can tell you a lot about the financial health of your hotel.

The difference between TrevPAR and GopPAR:

TrevPAR gives you an overview of how the business is doing across the board based on revenue. Meanwhile, GopPAR goes a step further and looks at how your hotel is doing in terms of operational performance. Based on the TrevPAR index, you will see that the hotel is doing very well with great sales. However, if the operating costs are too high, the GopPAR metric will show that the actual profit is not as you expected, and you will have to keep your operating costs under control.

GopPAR formula:

(Gross revenue) – (Operating expenses) = Gross Operating Revenue (GOR)

(Gross Operating Revenue) ÷ (Total number of available rooms) = GopPAR

Example:

Assuming you have 10 rooms, your gross operating revenue (GOR) last year was $100,000. The calculation of the GopPAR is as follows:

$100,000 GOR ÷ 10 rooms = $10,000 GopPAR

How to improve GopPAR Index?

• Boost your revenue

Increasing hotel revenue would result in increasing the GopPAR. There are several ways to do it. For example, adjusting room rates, create add-on packages…However, you want to plan a pricing strategy that matches the quality of the service you provide.

• Minimize operating costs

In addition to increasing your revenue, cutting your operating costs will also improve your GopPAR. Using modern management software and applying technology in daily operations can help to cut costs. Note that cutting operating costs must not affect your guests’ experience.

6. Average Length of Stay – ALOS

What is ALOS?

ALOS stands for Average Length of Stay. In other words, this is the metric that represents the average number of night guests staying at your hotel. By tracking the ALOS index, you can find out if your guests stay shorter or longer than usual. As a result, you can encourage longer stays at your hotel.

ALOS formula:

(Total occupied room nights) ÷ (Total number of bookings) = ALOS

Example:

Let us say you had 60 room nights and 12 bookings in the previous month. So, the ALOS in that month will be 60 ÷ 12 = 5 nights.

How to improve ALOS?

• Setting a minimum length of stay

A quick way to increase ALOS is to set a minimum length of stay (02 nights, 03 nights, etc.). This will significantly improve the ALOS, especially in the low season.

• Flexible pricing policy

You can offer promotions for longer stays. For example, a discount of 5% for guests staying 05 nights or more. 

Catch on to the rest of the metrics in the next article: “The revenue management metrics every hotel owner needs to know (Part 2)” to learn about 06 other important metrics in measuring your hotel business.