Hotel Revenue & Management Blog

The hotel industry generally suffers from a victim mentality. AirBnB is the big bad wolf that is not playing according to our rules. Them and other sharing economy business models are bringing damage to our hotels, and it isn’t happening in a fair way. But let's turn the game around and find out what we can learn from them to become better at our own business, hotel management, a.k.a. hospitality … Let’s have a look at their strategies to find some disruptive ideas and see how we can apply them in our hotels. Ready?

With around $300 billion spent every year overseas, Chinese market is incredibly tempting for hotels, but it's probably the hardest one to penetrate as well. We are always looking to develop our revenue management and distribution strategies for new opportunities. Talking with some of the experts in the market we have put together a top 10 list of tips and best practices to make your hotel ‘chinese friendly’ and attract this massive growing market segment.

Con Air: what is brandjacking?

The neologism brandjacking was coined over a decade ago, by astutely combining the words branding and hijacking. In our industry, when we talk about brandjacking, we usually refer to all those activities whose lowest common denominator is the exploitation of another company brand's equity, such as the creation of fake social network profiles or mirror-websites. The most frequent use of brandjacking is, however, is the one that goes under the name of Affiliate Brand Bidding. This mischievous tactic consists in investing in search engines advertising campaigns and bidding on terms that are related targeted company. Ever googled your  hotel’s name and found Booking.com, Expedia, trivago and TripAdvisor before your official website? Well, that’s ABB. 

Independent and boutique hotels have the opportunity to capitalise on traveller appetite for unique experiences. Big hotel chains simply can’t compete on this front. And your hotel is also able to completely differentiate itself from other independent hotels. Coupling this with the implementation of hotel revenue management best practices gives your hotel ample opportunity. Read our 10 hotel revenue management tips here to drive the success of your organisation.

Driving your profitability in the most efficient manner is a challenge that all hotels face. But here at Xotels, we have found that there are certain key performance indicators (KPIs) that are particularly powerful. Some of the commonly used KPIs include Average Room Rate (ARR), Bedroom Occupancy Rate (OCC) and Cost per Occupied Room (CPOR). But, in this article we focus on the three hotel revenue management KPIs that experts use to maximise profitability in particular.

In our last article with tips on pre-opening a hotel we focused on PR, the website and SEO. We will now expand our pre-opening checklist with key points concerning revenue management, distribution, reservations, sales and the systems needed to make your success story complete.