Trending is a hotel benchmarking service, and at our sister company BPO we provide a number of financial services for all hospitality businesses with arguably the largest portfolio of pubs and restaurants in the Cork area.
Whether you run a hotel, bar, restaurant or coffee shop finding your customer profile is vital for your business.
The questions Trending answers for our customers are as follows:
1. Where is the rooms industry currently performing at – what are the current room rate and occupancy levels?
2. Are these rates and occupancy moving up, down or flat?
3. Is this trade moving up in one area and down in another – or if all rising who is rising at a higher level?
4. Are certain types of hotels rising at a faster or slower pace than others – is the market rewarding budget 3 star over luxury 4 star?
5. How has new business impacted current market trends?
6. Where is your business versus the market trend? You might be happy to grow by 5% until you find out the industry is growing by 10%.
New additions to Trending’s analysis is Market Segmentation and Nationality Statistics. Understanding your customer profile is a critical piece to the analysis in understanding why your business is moving with the trend or against the trend or moving at a different pace to the trend.
Finding your customer profile could protect you from the storms of the future or help you capitalise on market opportunity.
1. What market does your business rely on the most? What percentage of your business is corporate and if your business is corporate how risky is this business? The corporate business are always looking for the new venue to bring their employees and management.
2. Corporate customers are organised and structured on how they deal with their service providers. What you charged last year is in their budgets and budgets get approved.
3. If your dominant customer is tourist related then they have generally picked your city and travel times around flights and holiday suitability, not around hotel availability. They tend to pay prevailing market rates and what your hotel charged last year is irrelevant to this year’s tourist.
4. On the flip side your corporate client will spend in January, where your tourist is nowhere to be seen.
5. Also don’t forget your life blood which is your domestic customers who is influenced by so many market factors from a tweet from Trump to his neighbour’s new PCP car as to where he will spend his euros next.
6. Nationality matters as not all tourists are the same. The UK Tourist who trips over to Dublin for a weekend on a £50 Ryanair flight is not the same as American tourist who comes for a week to see the whole of Ireland for a once in a life time trip – they don’t not have the same budget –Nationality profile matters, currency matters.
Understanding your customer profile from their nationality and market segmentation matters – who your customers is, where he/she comes from and why are they here matters to your business. Understanding how your profile differs from your markets profile is key to risk and opportunity management.