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The Hotellisense Team

Hotel PMS: Using Analytics can Help You Get the Sales that You Want

Instantly get insights from your hotel PMS, grow your revenue and stay competitive.



Your hotel PMS holds large volumes of data.


Analysis of this data can give you answers to questions like:

  • How can I run more targeted marketing campaigns?

  • What’s driving my hotel’s sales performance right now and why?

This information is gold as it can help you bring more customers or see where you have to focus to improve your hotel’s performance quickly and proactively.


But to find the information you are looking for you have to be able to analyze the raw data of your hotel PMS fast and effectively.


In many cases hotel decision-makers dig through their hotel PMS report by report to collect, combine and organize their data in order to analyze it with traditional tools such as spreadsheets. This is a manual and static process which limits the range, depth and speed of their analysis, lowers their productivity and at the end of the day it costs a lot of time and money.


Business intelligence and hotel analytics tools on the other hand are the tools to go for when you want to analyze large volumes of data. These tools can help you collect and analyze this data efficiently and get insights fast so you can plan ahead, strategize, act proactively and eventually get the sales that you want.


These tools can help you answer almost any question regarding your hotel’s performance in real-time - the number of questions is fueled only by your imagination. You start the analysis of your hotel PMS data with some initial, specific questions and if additional questions come up during your analysis, these tools allow you to answer them dynamically and in real-time. How many times have you wished to have a similar report replacing X with Z in one of the axes, or even a sub-report digging in your findings?


But let's go back to the above two questions and see in more detail how business intelligence and hotel analytics tools can help you make the best out of the data of your hotel PMS.


Run more targeted campaigns using hotel PMS data

Say, for example, that you want to boost your direct bookings by running an online search ad campaign. Before you even write a single line of your ads, you have to identify the targeting options of your campaign. That is who you will be talking to (a specific segment), with what offer and when to run it.


By targeting a specific segment - a group of guests with common characteristics (e.g. business, family, guest nationality) - your offers and messaging/marketing will be more personalized and more effective because it will be like you’re talking to them, not just to everybody.


Your search ads will show up when your prospect customers will most likely be searching to make their booking and with an offer that might be more appealing to them.


With a business intelligence and hotel analytics tool you can explore the data in your hotel PMS in real-time and instantly discover the segments you want to target and what to offer. It could be, for example, a guest nationality that has lower direct bookings compared to last year’s direct bookings for the time period you’re interested in. Or, it could be your best performing guest nationality based on criteria you want, for example, a guest nationality that brings very high ADR or may bring you lower ADR but brings very high F&B revenue etc.


Once you have selected the segment you want to target, you can carry on your analysis and find what room type this segment usually books, which booking source they book through (your website in our example), how many days before their arrival they book, how many days they stay and what is the ADR.


Doing this analysis for any segment you want, you can come up with a good starting point of an offer per segment increasing the effectiveness of your campaign.


Find what’s driving hotel sales performance and why using hotel PMS data

With a business intelligence and hotel analytics tool you can monitor whether your monthly/yearly forecast is lagging vs last year or vs your forecast or vs your budget. And then explore with a few clicks if it is due to a booking source, a segment, a guest nationality, a certain room type, a slow pick up or maybe the F&B department that is not doing very well.


If, for example, you discover that the pick up for this month is running low, it is very important to see it as soon as possible so you have time to plan ahead and react fast (maybe fix room pricing or make a promotion to enhance bookings etc.). This is even more crucial especially for bookings that are very close to the arrival date (such as last minute bookings).


Or if, for example, it is due to the performance of a booking source (e.g. tour operators etc.), then you will be able to see it and negotiate better with them. You can instantly see which booking source reaches their targets, who brings in higher ADR, higher F&B revenue or who brings lower ADR but may bring high F&B revenue and decide which is more profitable for your hotel. You can get insights like these very fast even in front of your channel partner when you are negotiating with them.


This level of hotel business intelligence together with your experience can help you bring more sales. It can help you analyze your data faster, more efficiently and with less cost, freeing you from manual, static processes and allowing you to invest the time saved on more value-added and strategic tasks.

Your hotel PMS is just one data source. With business intelligence and hotel analytics tools you can integrate additional hotel internal data sources such as your hotel POS to help you analyze guest segment behavior, improve guest experience during their stay at the hotel, and increase your F&B revenue or integrate external data such as flight and hotel searches for your destination to predict demand etc.


If you are interested, you can check our hotel analytics platform. Our platform integrates and collects data from your hotel PMS (and all your hotel POS systems), analyzes it and presents this analysis in tens of ready-made hotel analytics dashboards (designed specifically for hotels). This allows you to get performance insights right ‘out-of-the-box’ without any application development skills or help from IT and helps you make smarter and profitable decisions for your hotel.



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