How to execute a commercial strategy, break down silos and increase efficiency with the new Overview

If you were asked to identify an area of life or business that wasn’t turned upside down by the pandemic, it would be a nearly impossible task. The hospitality sector and revenue management in particular were hit hard by the crisis. 

Even today, with demand returning in more and more markets, challenges remain. But with the right tools and strategies at hand, you can overcome them and tap into new revenue streams during the recovery and beyond.

Grappling with an all-new competitive landscape

With the emergence of COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns, historical data became relatively obsolete from one day to the next. Established demand and booking patterns went overboard, and the competitive landscape changed significantly. Due to furloughs and downsizing, fewer staff were left to deal with countless changes. 

However, even with demand growing once again, challenging conditions continue. Yes, it’s good news to see increased pick-up as markets re-open. But, with 32.5% of hoteliers saying their property is understaffed, commercial teams are leaner and have more on their plate than before. At the same time, commercial departments must be alert and quick to react since competition is fiercer than ever. Unfortunately, the silo culture that has manifested itself between revenue, sales, distribution and marketing teams often makes it harder to identify and work towards common goals.

Setting commercial teams up for success

For hoteliers who want to get ahead and thrive, a silo mentality is simply no longer an option. Instead, savvy hoteliers require efficiency, streamlined communication, collaboration and the ability to access and share live, forward-looking market and competitor data. This is the key to uncovering and seizing revenue opportunities before the competition.

There are already tech tools in place that can gather vast amounts of relevant real-time information and thus slash the time spent on manual data collection. They provide the insights needed to optimize pricing and distribution. However, it still takes time to sift through vast volumes of data before you can make any decisions. And teams engaged in a silo mentality often don’t share this information, so decisions from different departments end up not being aligned, which impacts overall efficiency.

But now, there’s finally an easy way to solve this challenge, break down silos and enable commercial teams to work together more efficiently for maximized business results.

Consolidate business intelligence and break down silos with the Overview

Hoteliers have been aware of the silo effect and its negative impact on business performance for some time. Despite a willingness to change, the lack of integrated technology was one of the main factors keeping commercial teams from collaborating more successfully. 

Now, the launch of OTA Insight’s new Overview will solve this challenge by providing a consolidated overview of key metrics relevant to all commercial departments. Getting all this information in one place vastly improves internal communication and allows for faster, more data-driven decision-making. With The Overview, hoteliers can react, adapt and drive business in today’s fast-paced and competitive market environment. 

For the first time, a single platform makes all this information accessible to all stakeholders in real time. That includes senior management, commercial and operations departments, and regional leadership teams. The Overview shows data from any combination of OTA Insight’s business and market intelligence  tools to provide an accurate live snapshot of property/market performance and KPIs.

Depending on the tools a subscriber is using, this can include distribution health per channel, price competitiveness, events and holidays, market demand (based on upper-funnel search data), OTB data vs market, pick-up, ADR and revenue. This can provide a deep understanding of the market, demand and your hotel’s positioning in seconds. 

Increase efficiency with leaner commercial teams

The Overview does away with the need to click back and forth between tabs or manually collate data into reports. Instead, you can now receive an instant snapshot of all KPIs in one central homepage. This helps you track key insights into your revenue, distribution and market performance quickly and with ease. 

Especially if you’re working within a leaner team, you’ll benefit from saving time handling your data manually. First, you’ll be able to make well-informed commercial pricing and revenue decisions faster than ever.  With the alert feed, you can boost productivity and stay on top of your day, by easily monitoring the most important commercial changes and opportunities at a glance.  Second, you can reinvest your time in more strategic planning and analysis, developing new commercial approaches and staff training.

Finally, the Overview also comes in handy if you want to present your results in a concise format during meetings with your team, management, or the owners. Again, you save time on preparing your report because your data is already laid out in a clear and visually appealing format. 

Deepen collaboration across commercial departments

Use the Overview to streamline internal communication by sharing key insights across your entire team. Simply give them access to the platform, so everyone can view a snapshot of your overall performance and KPIs. Since the view is individually customizable, each team member can select the data most relevant to their work.

This can help foster a greater understanding of how one commercial department’s decisions can impact the others. More informed and constructive interdepartmental discussions about promotions, targeted campaigns, rate changes, etc. are the consequence. This can enable your team to effectively set and work towards common goals and measure progress along the way. The data immediately shows if there’s room for improvement, making it easy to correct your course quickly. 

Uncover opportunities in a fiercely competitive market

Despite recovery being in full swing in many markets, occupancy is often still lower than pre-pandemic levels. But, since every property wants to win as much business as possible to recover faster, competition is fiercer than usual. On top of that, demand patterns still haven’t gone back to 2019 levels. 

In this situation, it’s difficult to plan ahead and set pricing and promotional strategies without forward-looking insights, ideally powered by availability & upper-funnel search data. The Overview offers a detailed snapshot of pricing, availability and upper-funnel search data you need, to understand how your hotel compares to the competition and the market as a whole. You can also drill down on specific areas in seconds, so you always immediately spot the latest changes in demand and the new possibilities they bring. 

Let these insights be your North Star when analyzing emerging opportunities and deciding how to react. This will help you adjust your rates quickly every time demand shifts. You’ll also find it easier to optimize your hotel’s positioning and avoid outpricing yourself during slower periods. As a result, you’ll be implementing more effective and refined pricing strategies that increase your revenue even in challenging market conditions. With all of your key metrics in one place, commercial decision making that includes a mix of pricing, marketing, placement and promotion has never been easier.

Summary

In a time where smaller teams are tasked to do more with less, it’s crucial to place trust in tools that will maximize efficiency, improve collaboration and help your team make the best decisions possible. 

If you’re looking to save time, and do more with your data, now is the time to take action, with the Overview. With the Overview you and your team can now easily plan, monitor and execute on key commercial decisions more effectively than ever before.