Beyond the balance sheet: Unleashing potential through insightful financial reporting

Discover how to unleash the power of your data

The hospitality industry is more competitive than ever before, but data is the key to standing out from the crowd and driving growth. It's imperative that today's hotelier understands how to unlock the power of the information that is already being collecting.

The hospitality landscape is bigger and more competitive than ever before, and this is predicted to continue growing for years to come. As a result, having the most up-to-date information at your fingertips is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have. If hotels and resorts want to grow along with their competitors, they need to understand the inner workings of their operations on a granular level-and that means embracing data analytics via hotel software management.

It's no secret that better financial reporting and analysis can provide insight, but it also helps to form an evidence-based roadmap for making strategic decisions, giving you valuable assurance that your next move will be profitable. Those who are already taking advantage of data-driven decision making know the effect it can have on a hotel's bottom line-for example, a recent McKinsey study showed that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, and 19 times more likely to be profitable.

So, the link between a focus on data and elevated financial performance is clear. But how can hoteliers start making the most of the information at their disposal?

Get centralized
It's likely that you already collect a wide range of data about your guests and their experiences at your hotels-but where does this data get stored?

Maintaining data collection across various legacy systems in different locations is time consuming and makes it difficult to extract the value hiding within. The hassle associated with having to chase separate parties with disparate data-handling protocols is a hindrance to insightful financial reporting, and hoteliers have enough to juggle as it is.

This is why it's imperative that those in the hospitality industry make it a priority to adopt a centralized, intelligent data system. Doing so creates one unified source of truth that stakeholders from across your network of hotels can easily draw on to help make decisions on the fly, setting the foundations in place for your teams to derive meaningful value from the data you're already collecting.

With that in mind, let's take a look at a few key ways that this will help you to optimize financial decision-making.

Dynamic pricing
For most hoteliers, business tends to be seasonal, based on a wide range of factors like location, climate, and nearby cultural events. Naturally, this presents an opportunity to make the most of busy periods, while offering discounts and special offers during quieter stretches. Most hotels broadly do this already-but many are missing out on capturing additional stays during smaller day-to-day fluctuations, purely because they aren't tracking when those dips and troughs occur.

Instead, revenue analytics can help you adjust room rates automatically to accommodate hidden fluctuations in demand. For example, would you know if your competitors were covertly raising their prices for a particular week? Having clear data visibility can unearth this sort of information and turn it into your secret weapon for keeping your pricing strategy optimal in every market condition.

Market position
Do you know how your hotel fits into the market? Of course, every hotelier is aware of whether they offer a budget-friendly or luxury experience, but would you be able to pin-point precisely how your business compares to its competitors, or what you need to do to get closer to the segment of the market you'd like to conquer?

That's where the data comes in. By analyzing a mixture of real-time and historical data, financial leads can establish a holistic 360-degree view of where their hotel stands in comparison to others-including what rivals may be doing to achieve their success. This is invaluable for ensuring that your branding is driving value, giving you the power to realign your offering to develop your position in the market by making the next steps obvious.

Segment analysis
Each individual guest has their own set of behaviors around booking, organizing, and spending on trips. Manually analyzing this across your entire client-base would be impossible, but advances in technology make it possible to collate this information and discover the patterns and habits of every unique guest.

Once you've identified these with detailed segmentation analysis, you can maximize customer profitability by tailoring services for your most valuable customers or producing the right offer at the right time to turn a one-time stayer into a repeat guest. From when they tend to book, to how much they spent on food and drink during their last stay, every aspect of their trip is an opportunity to provide an elevated, tailored experience-enabling you to boost loyalty and revenue at the same time.

Leading the way forward with accounting software for hotels
Finance managers are now in the fortunate position to unlock endless commercial opportunities for hotels and resorts. As the hospitality industry evolves, having access to continuous insights borne out of real-time intelligence will be a vital weapon for staying ahead of the competition and ensuring operations remain profitable and efficient as your hotel scales. Combining the right solutions and the right attitude will mean the sky's the limit for what your hotel can achieve in the years to come.

Find out more about how better data visibility can take your hotel to new heights.