Smith Travel Research (STR)
for Hoteliers and Innkeepers

Smith Travel Research (STR) for Hoteliers and Innkeepers

By Nathan Gawlik
Nathan Gawlik's experience includes being a General Manager of a Hampton Inn and other front line roles such as a Banquet Captain, Front Desk Agent, Housekeeper, Catering Event Manager, and Director of Sales.

STR's mission is to "deliver data that is confidential, accurate, and actionable... to empower our clients to strategize and compete within their markets."

STR brings the facts. The organization was founded in 1985 and has since become a staple of the hotel industry as an authority on market performance and benchmarking. STR has offices in 15 countries and collects data globally from Asia, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and North America - collecting data from more than 67,000 hotels.

"We collect rooms available, rooms sold and net room revenue on a monthly, weekly and daily basis," STR continues. "We also collect data broken down by source of business (transient, group and contract) and source of revenue (room, F&B and other). On an annual basis, we process profitability data by department."

Imagine how you could improve your strategy if you knew the answer to the following questions:

Am I performing below or above my market?
Did I overprice or underprice rooms in the last month?
If I overpriced rooms, did my occupancy suffer as a result?
Or conversely, if my rate was steady but occupancy was up or down, were there any groups, conferences or large events in my market? Did I miss an opportunity to drive higher rates when the market had high occupancy?

Let's take a second to review some key terms:

What is benchmarking?
Benchmarking is the process of comparing and analyzing your property or portfolio's performance against the competition. The benchmarking process draws on STR's robust historical data to provide you with a better understanding of the market and context in which you operate.

They do this to evaluate three key points. Some of you may already be familiar with these terms but the below definitions might be helpful in understanding STR's role.

Above is an example of an STR report. You can see the full example here.

What is a competitive set (comp set)?
A comp set is a group of hotels that compete with your property for business and is selected with the purpose of benchmarking your performance against the competition.

What is ADR?
Average daily rate is a measure of the average rate paid for rooms sold. This is calculated by dividing room revenue by rooms sold.

What is RevPAR?
The gold standard metric around the industry, revenue per available room is calculated by dividing total room revenue by total number of available rooms. RevPAR is a function of both occupancy and ADR.

"Deliver data that is confidential, accurate, and actionable."

STR helps property managers understand the importance of key performance indicators and how to implement the confidentially aggregated market rate and occupancy data, ideally through driving greater revenue at your properties.

If your property isn't currently using Smith Travel Research, I would imagine that they will be soon. STR is a valuable and free resource to see your performance. Armed with the information they provide, properties can better position themselves within their market.

STR offers a variety of different, helpful reports. Their extensive reports span several different data points. Properties can analyze their performance by day of week, by segment, and by season.

Properties can also see how they performed against their competitors across RevPar, ADR & Occupancy. STR can even help properties by understanding what accommodations are in the pipeline or under construction.

You can view different reports according to your budget. As the General Manager of a hotel, I would look forward to this report coming out each week. We eagerly anticipated our ranking among our key performance indicators.

The STR report will provide your placement each week. We had 6 other hotels in our competitive set and we would see how we were ranked out of 7. Under the three KPIs it would state, 1 of 7, or 2 of 7 along with our performance.

The report doesn't provide the other properties' specific performance, just our property's ranking and performance.

Enroll in STR

Sources

www.str.com

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MARKETING

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CASE STUDIES

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