Hotels operate in a highly competitive environment. Understanding what your competitors offer is crucial to discovering your unique selling points. The first step is to define a competitive set you think guests compare you against when booking.
Prices
Pricing intelligence tools enable automated monitoring of the room rates set by your competitors on multiple channels and also estimate the optimal room rates for your property at a given moment. For more info on this topic, please read the article ‘What to know about dynamic pricing’. The purpose of price monitoring is not to become a price follower, but to better understand your relative positioning in the market.
Guest reviews
Online reputation affects room prices and hotel occupancy. Comparing overall ratings isn’t enough; to get actionable insights, you need to analyze the content of reviews. It will help you understand what guests like and dislike about your competition, and what makes you stand out.
For example, if your competitor’s guests often complain about housekeeping, you can use your communication platforms to highlight your great housekeeping standards (if in place). If their guests praise tourist attractions in the area, promote your proximity to those attractions or offer free transport. Discover the main topics in your competitors’ positive reviews and make them work for you as well. Commercial tools like ReviewPro and GuestRevu are a great alternative to doing this manually.
Booking sites
You should regularly check your competitors’ booking channels to check if there have been changes to what they offer, such as new amenities that may enhance the guest experience.
Social media
Following competitors’ social media can give you a sense of what types of content your market is interested in and engaged with. When you find out what works, create and publish content tailored to your market’s preferences. A paid tool like Fanpage Karma can show you what times of the day or week your competitors are posting on and getting the highest engagement. Use that data to optimize your posting times. Also, check which post types get the most engagement.
Website stats
You can easily find out which keywords are leading people to your competitors’ websites (e.g., Rank Tracker, SpyFu, or SimilarWeb), and use those keywords in your content. Check which domains and pages are linking to your competitor’s websites, and try to link them to yours.
Find out what paid searches your competition is running. They may have a better understanding of the search terms your target market is using to find accommodation in your area. By creating content in line with those search terms, you can attract more organic traffic to your website. Semrush is one of the best tools for getting your competitors’ website stats, such as top keywords, referring domains, and paid searches they have been running.
Media coverage
Google Alerts or Awario may help you keep in touch with what your competitors are doing. Set up alerts and get notified when news that involve your competitors appears in the media. You can use paid media monitoring tools that can help track online and traditional media and social media in real time, such as Determ.
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