The tried and true KPI, or ways we measure our hotel’s performance. They do not speak about digital marketing as a KPI here, because it’s tied to our classic measurements of performance: https://www.hospitalitynet.org/news/4104058.html
However, we’re at times behind the trends, and the data revolution means that we hotel people need to wrap our heads around other metrics that may be of value, that we simply don’t “see” yet, as unlocking the data and asking questions in how it can be perceived is a very new thing for us. But in interest of our owners… time to grow and learn!
I’m noticing as owners want to not only track performance by standard definitions, they also want to unlock this world of data, and make it accessible in a way that tells a story. And that’s been exciting to me as a concept. BUT, we’ve had the digital data for about 15 years, and there’s still no silver bullet. I am so excited to unlock more data analysis that leads to real understanding about ops.
A great example is being able to track guest sentiment over time to create a word cloud that can tag or highlight issues before they’re a performance impacting issue or problem… ie fixing a rattling window mentioned by a few guests, or realizing the hot water heater is about to go out because of a guest comment, tracked and documented, and acted upon. Or reading negative sentiment about a lack of adult pool, so you can plan capital projects based on guest desires and needs, vs whims or following fads.
But sentiment is just one aspect of this, and I’m looking at all our normal performance and health KPIs, vs any blind spots I might have in looking for interesting and new ways to track ourselves, and learn. One interesting idea is not just looking at Marketing ROI, but Marketing ROI vs RevPAR, and if those numbers might tell a helpful story about operations or marketing.
Ideally, we’ll end up in an automated machine learning AI world where a robot pings us to say that “in 443.2 hours the internet will fail”, but not quite like Hal 9000. Something akin to that, so we can automate the health of the hotel and operational performance. Until then, tracking the generated revenue can be even more time consuming than creating it. When you have to spend time tracking, that is a cost. When you spend time creating the revenue, that’s a healthier business. So we’ve got to get to a place where this becomes cut, dry, clear, and automated… or we will be losing out on potential revenue while talking about the revenue we did make. Also, I note that it isn’t just the expense of time and energy creating these reports, but it’s also that there’s a delta between the revenue generated and the revenue we could have added on top of that *plus* the cost.
So we’re trying to innovate, and I’m open to hearing of KPI that are missing… especially from a digital marketing perspective. But what KPIs could we track that aren’t here…
… and ESPECIALLY what KPIs are relatively meaningless, don’t tell a story, or are overvalued?
Funny there are 42 total KPI. Douglas Adams would have loved it. =)
This is interesting, on expense KPI:
https://www.verdant.co/hotel-industry-kpis/
Hotel Expense KPI
- Energy Management
- Water Consumption
- Labor Cost as % of Sales **
Financials
- Total Available Rooms
- Gross Operating Profit
- Occupancy
- Average Daily Rate
- Average Room Rate (ARR)
- Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR)
- Net Revenue per Available Room (NRevPAR)
- Revenue Per Occupied Room (RevPOR)
- Gross operating profit per available room (GOPPAR)
- Cost per Occupied Room (cPOR)
- Average Length of Stay (AvgLOS)
- Market Penetration Index (Occ vs Comp)
- Marketing ROI, ie marketing spend vs RevPAR **
- Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA)
Guest Experience KPI
- Online Rating Aggregation
- Customer Satisfaction
- Guest Sentiment via Survey
- Loyalty
Employee KPI
- Employee output
- Employ sentiment
Lastly…. These specifically for digital marketing are interesting:
https://linpack-for-tableau.com/data-visualizations/tableau-dashboards/general-services-business-travels-hotel-dashboard/custom-analysis-kpi/
- Total Booking Volume
- # of Bookings: Total number of bookings
- # of Nights: Total number of nights booked
- Nights per Booking: Average number of nights per booking
- Avg Room Price: Average room price
- ABW – Advance Booking Window: Days between booking date and hotel check-in date
- # of Tickets (booked online): Total number of tickets booked online
- OAR – Online Adoption Rate: Share of online bookings
- Lowest Rate Accepted %: Share of bookings where the lowest rate was accepted
- # of Travelers: Total number of distinct travelers
- Booking Volume per Traveler: Average booking volume per traveler
- Total △ Booking vs Lowest Rate: Total difference between Room Price vs Lowest Rate
- Avg △ Ticket vs Lowest Rate: Average difference between Room Price vs Lowest Rate
- Total Lowest Rate: Total Booking at Lowest Rate
- Ticket vs Lowest Rate: % Over price vs Lowest Rate in %
- Bookings per Traveler: Average number of bookings per Traveler
- Nights per Traveler: Average number of nights per Traveler
- Destination Cities: Total number of distinct destination cities
- Destination Countries: Total number of distinct destination countries