Hotel benchmarking: what is it all about?
HBenchmark owes its name to the main service it offers to hoteliers: it is benchmarking, a methodology used in business and economics that has spread rapidly even within the hotel sector.
But what does it consist of? First of all, let's see a definition of benchmarking: it is a systematic and continuous process of comparing the processes and services of your company with the best competitors or leading companies, in order to identify best practices or critical factors of industry success to intelligently adapt them to their business and improve their performance.
The method consists of the analysis of companies considered excellent in particular activities and in the identification of performance standards (called benchmarks) on the basis of which to measure their own gap (the gap or difference).
The main features of benchmarking are, therefore: comparison aimed at learning; continuity, as it cannot be applied once, but must be included in a regular cycle of company improvement; the systematic measurement of critical issues and best practices in the sector Focusing attention on the hotel sector, the main KPIs (performance indicators) that can be used in benchmarking are the ADR (average revenue per room sold), the percentage of Room occupancy and the RevPAR (the average revenue per room available), an indicator for Revenue Management particularly suitable for comparing structures of different sizes. But beware: benchmarking is often mistakenly reduced to a simple performance analysis or collection of information about others hotel, therefore to a mere comparison of data and not of causes. The key to the success of benchmarking instead lies in identifying one's own gap, in learning and implementing the best strategies, not in a simple observation. Best practices should not be adopted passively but adapted to the specificities of your structure. Finally, it is important to point out that hotel benchmarking is not a form of "industrial espionage" as it is based on cooperation and the creation of a hotel network: sharing one's data within a platform such as HBenchmark, the only one among the Other than allowing benchmarking on forecast data, hoteliers and revenue managers will have all the information necessary to identify the best strategies to apply in the future and to improve their performance.
