Benchmarks for Success: Why it's Important to Benchmark Your Hotel Portfolio

In the ever-evolving hospitality industry, maintaining a competitive edge is not just a desire but a necessity. Whether you oversee a single boutique hotel or a vast array of properties, understanding the performance of each establishment is pivotal to achieving excellence and profitability. This blog post delves into the significance of benchmarking within the hospitality sector, exploring how this practice can revolutionise your approach to managing a diverse portfolio of properties.

At its core, benchmarking allows you to evaluate how your various properties measure against one another. This strategic and essential practice provides an in-depth analysis of strengths and weaknesses within your portfolio. By comparing properties and sharing best practices across your hospitality group, you can optimise operations, allocate resources effectively, and maintain a consistent standard of customer experience. Through-out this blog, we will explore the manifold benefits of benchmarking, from strategic planning to fostering a culture of continuous improvement and informed decision-making, which is vital for staying competitive and relevant in this rapidly changing industry.

A Strategic Imperative

Benchmarking properties against each other is not just a good idea; it's a strategic imperative. To achieve success, you must clearly understand which properties are thriving and which are underperforming. With this knowledge, you can allocate resources effectively, identify best practices, and optimise operations. Moreover, benchmarking ensures that you consistently deliver a high-quality customer experience across your portfolio.

At its core, benchmarking empowers strategic planning by providing a comprehensive overview of your portfolio's performance. With this data, you can confidently set goals, develop strategies, and make data-driven decisions. It also ensures solid facts and figures inform your choices, whether you're considering expansion, repositioning, or divestment.

However, the one-size-fits-all approaches don't work in the hospitality industry. To unlock each property's full potential, you must break down your analysis into property types with similar attributes. For example, hotels with leisure clubs will have different payroll dynamics than those without such facilities. You can maximise your success by aligning each property's performance with its unique potential.

The Power of Sharing Best Practices

Knowledge-sharing of best practices is akin to discovering a secret sauce for any organisational triumph. It's not just about identifying what works; it's about ensuring that these successes permeate every facet of your hospitality group.

Benchmarking acts as your compass, directing you to the brightest stars within your portfolio. It unveils the hidden gems – strategies, techniques, and approaches yielding exceptional results. Take, for example, a scenario where one of your hotels excels in payroll forecasting, maintaining an ideal staffing balance that others can only dream of. This is not a stroke of luck; it's a product of diligent analysis and process application.

Once these winning strategies are identified through benchmarking, the magic truly begins. Hotel managers can take these proven tactics and propagate them throughout the group. The intelligent forecasting techniques that optimise staffing at one property can easily be replicated across others. This cross-pollination of expertise allows you to harness collective knowledge within your hospitality group, maximising operational efficiency and, ultimately, profitability.

Sharing best practices isn't just about carbon-copying successful strategies but inspiring innovation. As hotel managers witness the impact of these shared practices, it ignites a spark of creativity and competition. They are motivated to think outside the box, to develop new initiatives, and to strive for excellence. Benchmarking becomes a catalyst for innovation and progress across your entire portfolio.

Moreover, in many organisations, best practices often remain confined to individual departments or properties, hidden behind silos of secrecy. Benchmarking dismantles these barriers. It encourages an environment where information flows freely between properties and departments, erasing the lines that separate success stories. This openness cultivates a sense of unity and shared purpose within the hospitality group.

The Value of Continuous Improvement and Informed Decision-Making

Benchmarking helps maintain momentum, fostering a culture of ongoing enhancement that keeps you competitive and relevant. It's not just about celebrating successes; benchmarking helps identify and learn from mistakes. Incidents and issues are inevitable, but benchmarking allows you to pinpoint the root causes, spotlight areas for improvement, and communicate solutions across the business.

The beauty of a culture of continuous improvement is that it doesn't necessitate disruptive overhauls. Instead, it encourages small, regular changes that collectively yield impressive long-term results. These changes can be as straightforward as refining guest check-in procedures or effectively managing the roster. Over time, these incremental improvements compound, resulting in a portfolio that operates more smoothly, efficiently, and profitably.

In addition, benchmarking fosters a culture of open communication and knowledge sharing within your hospitality group. When an issue is resolved, or an improvement is implemented successfully in one property, this knowledge can then be seamlessly communicated and adapted across the entire portfolio. This ensures that lessons learned from one property's experiences are not isolated but are integrated into the collective wisdom of the group, preventing similar issues from occurring elsewhere.

Moreover, informed decisions are confident decisions, and benchmarking lays the foundation for well-informed choices. It offers a comprehensive portfolio perspective, enabling you to develop precise strategies that hit the mark. Ongoing assessment through benchmarking reveals emerging patterns within properties and across the entire portfolio, helping you address issues before they become problematic.

The right hospitality software enables you to access real-time data. This data provides an in-the-moment snapshot of your entire portfolio, allowing you to capture dynamic changes as they unfold. With this real-time insight, you can adjust strategies promptly and effectively.

The Influence of Healthy Competition

Competition is inherent in the hospitality business, both among rival establishments and within your portfolio. General Managers are naturally competitive, and benchmarking can harness this spirit to drive excellence. By sharing best practices, you ignite healthy competition, motivating managers to excel, develop innovative initiatives, and raise their performance. Benchmarking sets a higher baseline for performance, ensuring your properties continually strive for success.

Competition isn't solely about outperforming others; it's also about pushing boundaries and pioneering new initiatives. When general managers engage in friendly competition, they're inclined to explore novel approaches to elevate the guest experience and enhance operational efficiency. Benchmarking becomes the catalyst for innovation, propelling your portfolio to the forefront of the industry.

Furthermore, recognition is a potent motivator. By acknowledging and celebrating the achievements of your leadership team, you fuel their determination to excel. When managers see their names in light through accolades or elevated performance metrics, it instils a sense of pride and purpose. With its transparent insights, benchmarking provides the stage for spotlighting these accomplishments.

In essence, benchmarking serves as a vehicle for driving a higher baseline level of performance. It's not merely about reaching for the stars but consistently surpassing the ordinary—the portfolio benefits from elevated standards and improved outcomes when competition is harnessed and directed towards shared goals.

Summing up, in the competitive hospitality realm, benchmarking is the compass that guides you towards excellence. It's about more than maintaining a competitive edge; it's the key to thriving in a dynamic industry. At its heart, benchmarking is a strategic imperative, offering a panoramic view of your properties' performance. Armed with this invaluable insight, you can make informed decisions, set precise goals, and develop strategies that align with your portfolio's unique dynamics. Whether contemplating expansion, repositioning, or divestment, benchmarking ensures that your choices are grounded in empirical data, not mere conjecture.

By harnessing the power of benchmarking, you can make informed decisions, foster innovation, and inspire healthy competition within your hospitality group. It's the fuel that propels your portfolio towards new levels of success.

Discover Alkimii Finance

Benchmarking your hotel portfolio is a strategic necessity for success in the competitive world of hospitality. Alkimii Finance empower you to benchmark effectively, make informed decisions, and drive continuous improvement.

Our benchmarking features allow you to:

• Instantly identify top performers & those who require more support

• Decide how to best group your portfolio - by geographic region, property type or aligned to your leadership structure - it's up to you

• Quickly identify trends and changes in performance, allowing you to drill down into the data to make informed decisions.

Part of the Alkimii People package, Alkimii Finance offers the following features:

• Sales & Payroll Prediction: Compare forecasted vs. actual hours and revenue, monitor daily variances, and track payroll percentages.
• Real-Time Data: Access a hotel revenue dashboard and obtain real-time insights.
• Budget Analysis: Analyse historical, actual, and budgeted data in one application.
• Competitive Analysis: Measure your performance against industry peers regarding sales, payroll, and costs.
• Calendar-Centric Interface
• One-Click Download to Excel

It's time to take your hotel management to the next level. Discover the power of Alkimii and elevate your hospitality business today.