These days, the hotel industry is super competitive, and understanding what your competitors are up to isn’t just an advantage but also essential for survival.
A recent PwC survey found that a staggering 56% of executives rely on competitive intelligence to monitor potential rivals, all to map out their conquest of new markets over the next three years.
This underscores the importance of analyzing competition if you want to boost your hotel revenue.
Knowing your competitor’s strategies will help you to get insights that will put you on the path to boosting your hotel’s bottom line.
This guide will walk you through the steps you can take to analyze your competitors and put that insight to work for intensifying the revenue.
However, before that, let’s try to understand profoundly what competitor analysis is in the hotel industry.
What Is Competitor Analysis In Hotel Industry?
In the hotel industry, competitive analysis involves evaluating your competitor’s’ strengths and weaknesses to enhance your market positioning and revenue.
By studying competitors’ pricing, amenities, and customer reviews, hotels can identify their own strategic advantages and gaps. This analysis helps in setting optimal room rates, improving services, and crafting targeted marketing strategies.
It’s about understanding the local market dynamics to make data-driven decisions that boost occupancy and profitability. Regular competitor analysis ensures your hotel stays ahead by adapting to market changes and leveraging opportunities for growth.
How to Do Hotel Competitor Analysis?
Follow these steps to take a close look at what your competitors are doing – it will reveal some clever ways to bring in more guests and profits for your own hotel.
1. Identify Competitors and Build a Competitive Set
Not all the hotels in the town are your competitors. To take the stress off, it is important to identify the competitors who can affect your hotel room sales. It could be the nearest hotel and the hotel that offers the same level of service.
To identify them, here are a few tools and resources you can use:
Google Search and Maps: When it comes to identifying competitor hotels, there are a few different approaches you can take. One straightforward option is to use Google Search and Maps. Simply search for “hotels near me” or “hotels at [location],” and you’ll get a list of nearby properties. From there, you can check out their websites and see what kind of services, amenities, and other facilities they’re offering. This will help you pinpoint the major competition you need to keep an eye on.
OTAs: Another easy way is to check on online travel agencies (OTAs). Head to sites like Expedia or Booking.com, enter your desired location and dates, and you’ll get a list of comparable options based on factors like price, availability, location, star ratings, promotions, and deals.
Industry Reports and Market Research: If you’re dealing with a major hotel chain that has properties all over the country, industry reports and market research is an invaluable resources to find out the competition. These resources can give you insight into the chain’s overall strategy and positioning.
Revenue Management Software: Finally, for a more advanced approach, some revenue management software offers competitive analysis features. These tools not only help you identify competitors but also allow you to compare your pricing and availability with theirs in real time.
Once you’re done with picking out the competitors. Create a comp set to analyze factors like target market, amenities, pricing, and unique offerings to determine your true competition. Then, create a focused comp set (a list of the key competitors to closely monitor).
2. Gather Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence is a secret weapon that can help you to find out what your competitors are doing right to increase their occupancy, and what they are doing wrong which you should steer away from. The most important thing is, after gathering their data, you need to find out the ways of how you can beat them.
To gather competitive data, there are usually 3 areas to focus on-
1. Pricing Strategy –
While pricing isn’t the sole factor in a guest’s booking decision. But, undoubtedly it holds significant sway, especially for price-conscious travelers. To ensure your hotel room rates are neither too high nor too low, thorough research into your competitor’s pricing is crucial. If you’re looking for the best and fastest way to do this, consider the following:
Use a Hotel Price Comparison API
Hotelapi.co is a powerful hotel price comparison API that provides real-time pricing data from over 200 OTAs and hotel chains. It’s a super-fast and efficient solution to stay informed about your competitor’s rates. This API lets you compare hotel prices by selecting the location and hotel name.
Plus, it also facilitates pricing results in different currencies if you want to. So, visit the documentation page to understand how it works and how you can leverage it. Once you’ve grasped the details, feel free to try it out for free.
2. Guest Experience
When it comes to the hotel business, guest experience is king. 40% of the guests leave a review after a good stay, but even more, 48% are motivated to share their thoughts when the experience was bad (Source). The numbers don’t lie – people trust people, and a massive 46% are likely to book a hotel based solely on reviews (Source).
So, elevating that guest experience is kind of a big deal. But how do you go about doing that? Well, one of the best ways to do this is to keep a close eye on how your competitors are doing to improve their guest experience. You can do it by monitoring their social media comments, checking out brand mentions, and even using a hotel review API that serves up data from various booking sites.
At the end of the day, understanding what’s working and what’s not for your competition can provide some serious intel to help you level up your own guest experience game. And in an industry where word-of-mouth can make or break you, that’s something worth investing in.
3. Marketing Tactics
Understanding the marketing strategy of your competitors can directly put you a lot forward. It allows you to gain insight into what your competitors are doing and how what results are they getting out of that.
Here are a few ways you can analyze the marketing tactics of your competitors:
1. Analyze Their SEO
First things first, you need to use SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. These tools will help you see website traffic and the keywords they’re ranking for.
But here’s the kicker – rankings alone don’t tell the full story regarding conversions. That’s why you will also have to closely examine their website’s user experience, web copy, calls-to-action, and all the other little details that can make or break a visitor’s journey from just browsing to becoming an actual lead.
By analyzing competitor hotels’ websites, you can identify areas where you might be dropping the ball and course-correct accordingly.
2. Social Media Engagement
These days, social media is where people live their lives. The research doesn’t lie – according to the research published by Stacy Jo Dixon, internet users now spend an average of almost 143 per day scrolling and posting. For businesses tapping into social properly is reaping the benefits of brand awareness and superb sales. But you can’t just copy what the competition is doing. That’s a shortcut to being ignored.
To truly spark growth on social media, you need to analyze the field – see what’s working and what’s not, and where the opportunities lie.
Follow these steps to do that –
Identify Competitors: You should know who you are competing with. To find it out you can use Google and Social Media searches to pinpoint direct and indirect competitors. While researching, focus on those in your area or serving a similar target audience.
Collect Data: Once you know who you’re competing against. It’s time to dig up for information about their social media activity and engagement. For collecting relevant data, you can use tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite. Pay attention to metrics like engagement rates, follower growth, and posting frequency on platforms where your audience hangs out.
Analyze Their Strategy: Examine the content types (images, videos, stories), themes (promotional, educational, entertaining), and engagement tactics (contests, polls), your competitors use. Plus, also take note of their posting timing which gains the most traction. This will help you identify what resonates with their audience and any gaps in their strategy.
Listen Up: Even with brilliant marketing, if guests aren’t satisfied and leave negative reviews, it will tarnish a brand’s reputation, diminish return on investment, reduce repeat customers, and erode trust with potential new customers.
To get an insight into what people are talking about their brand you can use social listening with tools like Brand Watch or Brand Mention to understand the sentiment around competitor’s brands. This can reveal strengths you can imitate or weaknesses you can capitalize on.
Put Those Insights into Work: Benchmark your social media performance against your findings. Create an achievable strategy to incorporate successful tactics from competitors, fill in gaps they’ve missed, and differentiate your brand by innovating beyond their efforts.
3. Analyze Paid Advertising Strategies
Paid ads are tricky. Get it wrong and you’re just burning cash. But when you nail it, the magic happens – where you start seeing abundant returns on your investment.
For hotel business though, it’s a freaking war zone. You’ve got giant hotel chains and meta-search sites dropping mad budgets to dominate those top PPC spots, social media, and display ads.
The only way to survive and win in war is to closely study what’s already working and what’s an epic fail. That’s where your paid advertising competitive analysis comes in.
Here is how you can do it –
1. Identify Competitors
Start with identifying your direct and indirect competitors using tools like SEMRush or Ahref for PPC and display ad research. Plus, you can use Facebook Ad Library for social media advertising insights, it can even reveal the exact ad copy of your competitors. These platforms can reveal who is competing for your audience’s attention and how.
2. Strategy For Analyzing PPC and Display Ads:
Keyword and Placement Analysis: Use SEMRush and Google Ads Auction Insights to understand the keywords and ad placements competitors are targeting. This reveals their focus areas and potential gaps in your strategy.
Ad Copy and Creative Analysis: Evaluate the keywords, their placement, call to action, and other creative elements of their ad copy. Tools like Oracle Moat Measurement can help analyze display ad creatives. And, for getting insights on historical PPC ad performance you can use SpyFu.
3. Social Media Advertising:
Campaign Analysis: Examine competitor’s’ social media ad campaigns using Facebook Ad Library for transparency into their active campaigns. Look for patterns in campaign timing, targeting, and messaging.
Engagement and Performance: You can use Buzzsumo to analyze the engagement levels of competitor’s content which gives you an idea of what resonates with your shared audience.
4. Landing Page Analysis:
Analyzing the performance and ad copy is not enough. To estimate the level of engagement and conversion you also need to analyze the competitor’s landing page. For this purpose, you can use tools like Unbounce and Hotjar to offer insights into how users interact with landing pages, highlighting areas for improvement.
Plus, when evaluating the landing pages manually here are a few key elements you need to focus on –
- The clarity of the call-to-action (CTA)
- The relevance of content to the ad copy
- Page load speed, and mobile responsiveness
These factors play a crucial role in turning visitors into conversions. By understanding these aspects, you can refine your landing pages to better meet your audience’s needs and improve your overall conversion rate.
Conclusion:
In this guide, we have laid down the battle plan for crushing your hotel competitors and exposing their weaknesses. So, study this guide, put in the effort, and get ready to dominate the hotel industry.