Key revenue performance questions for hotels

The problem with too much data

Have you found yourself endlessly looking at data and then asking for more data to check or validate the first set of data?

Decisions should be made using data and we always have the challenge of not falling into the trap of reviewing too much data, or checking it with no purpose. Our time as revenue managers is our most valuable commodity and a good portion of it should be spent on strategy, thinking and decision making.

There are so many tools that pull in and show you interesting data. Rate shoppers continue to improve, event shopping is becoming more common, marketplace analytics are being supplied by OTAs, the PMS you use will have a lot of reports and more reports like STR now exist to show benchmarking data. Our access to data will only grow.

Different to key performance metrics

We think now is the time to take a moment and check not whether key performance metrics, such as RevPAR, GoPAR, or CAC or that reports are in place for your hotels, but whether you have a deck of key revenue performance questions.

Now is the time to form key performance questions, or for short KPQs.

Start with a few questions, not answers that are important to you, and work towards building a deck of key questions. We have put down some questions we think are important, but every business is different and every market is different. This means we believe the deck needs to be unique to you. Here are our ideas…

Ideas for key performance revenue questions

• “How is my revenue earned per room changing?”
• “How is my cost of acquiring a reservation changing and why?”
• “Which strategic changes we have made are working positively and why?”
• “Which strategic changes we have made have either no impact, are negative and why?
• “Why are we benchmarking against our current competitive set?”
• “How are items for auxiliary revenue performing and why?”
• “Which reservations are most valuable after cost of servicing – short stay or long stay?”

How do I go about creating key revenue performance questions?

Build a deck of questions around your revenue performance. Here is a guide to forming KPQs. The tips are to make questions open, keep them in line with strategy, to keep them short and to focus on the present and future.

We spend a lot of our time reviewing data and dreaming of ways to collect more data. Let’s spend more time asking the right questions of the data.

Let a revenue management system help

Using a revenue management system like Outperform RMS, will aggregate and evaluate data ad performance to make rate changes decided by algorithms that reduce time spent changing rates and micro-managing dates. This frees up more of your time to spend on reviewing metrics and asking the right key performance questions.

What KPQs are in your deck?

We’d love your ideas and feedback on which questions you find useful or you’ve thought of after reading this article.

Are KRPQs a new acronym?

Can we make Key revenue performance questions a thing? In hospitality and hotels we love an acronym. They are everywhere! KRPQs… We like this concept and would be excited to put together a guide to help revenue managers find the right questions to evaluate performance.

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