Is your hotel's data stuck in the past? Get ahead of the market with forward-looking competitive intelligence

By utilising a rate shopping tool like Rate Insight you stay ahead of the competition on room pricing, but is your competitive intelligence complete? True competitive intelligence goes beyond daily rates; it's about anticipating market trends and then measuring your performance to validate your strategy or make adjustments.

This is the power of a full-circle competitive intelligence strategy. By seamlessly integrating Market Insight and Benchmark Insight into your existing Lighthouse platform, you can enhance your experience with unique, forward-looking insights, updated daily.

This approach allows you to move beyond reactive tactics and become a proactive leader: predicting market demand, setting the right room rates at the right time, and benchmarking against a dynamic competitive set.

Rate insight: The cornerstone of competitive intelligence

Rate Insight is the foundation of your revenue strategy by collecting 1.7 billion rates per day and you access your competitor’s past, current, and future rates, it empowers you to make confident pricing and promotional decisions.

With Rate Insight you have real-time competitive intelligence on your competitors’ pricing strategy, reputation, and online travel agency (OTA) ranking.

The platform monitors pricing strategies across all key OTAs, brand.com, and the Global Distribution System (GDS), ensuring you never miss a mobile promotion or a discrepancy between channels. It is also the first solution to combine hotel and short-term rental data in a single platform, giving you a complete view of your competitive set.

Beyond current rates, Rate Insight provides a clear view on rate evolution, allowing you to monitor pace and rates to spot trends at your property and within your compset.

A critical functionality of Rate Insight is the ability to schedule rate shops up to 365 days in advance with live data refresh, enabling you to monitor competitor pricing and availability far into the future.

This granular data, down to the room type and length of stay, is what allows you to align or adjust your pricing based on factors like rate shopping and parity monitoring in one comprehensive dataset.

Enacting a dynamic room pricing strategy based upon accurate, real-time data is a crucial first step, but a competitive market such as this demands more.

To move beyond a strong revenue strategy to a truly dominant one, you must also anticipate what's coming next and measure your success with an advanced benchmark.

Market Insight: Forecasting demand ahead of your competition

To truly gain a competitive edge, you need to understand the market before bookings even occur. Market Insight is predictive intelligence that allows you to anticipate demand in your market up to 365 days ahead.

By giving you access to data from a wide variety of sources, including flight and hotel search data - which is a reliable indicator of demand - Market Insight moves you from a reactive revenue stance to a proactive one, implementing the right pricing and marketing strategies that perfectly match future market conditions.

This predictive layer is the missing link that connects your pricing strategy to the broader market context. Market Insight users have seen tangible results from this proactive approach, including a 4.7% boost in yearly occupancy and a 2.3% growth in yearly RevPAR.

With Market Insight, you gain access to powerful features that go beyond traditional historical data. You can:

• Spot demand spikes early: A demand heatmap visually identifies areas and time periods with high anticipated demand. You can segment this demand by sub-location, geo-search, stay pattern, and accommodation types for a granular view of your city's shifting demand. This enables you to strategically target pricing and marketing efforts.

• Understand where demand is coming from: Leverage flight search data to predict inbound demand from specific feeder markets, helping you optimize your marketing spend and campaigns.

• Take action with instant alerts: You can be alerted daily about demand and pricing opportunities, so you can adjust your strategy in the moment.

These insights help commercial teams work holistically and bridge the gap between revenue, distribution, sales, and marketing teams to achieve business goals.

The ability to anticipate market trends is invaluable, but to fully optimize your strategy, you need to understand your performance in relation to the wider market and your direct competitors.

Benchmark Insight: Your new standard for measuring market success

Now you’ve correctly anticipated demand and set dynamic room prices, how do you measure the success of your strategy?

With Benchmark Insight you can easily monitor competitor KPIs such as MPI (Market Penetration Index), ARI (Average Room Index) in a simple interface so you can identify opportunities for improvement at your property.

Instead of solely relying on historical benchmarking data that updates once or twice a week Benchmark Insight provides instant clarity on your competitive position with daily-refreshed, historical, and forward-looking occupancy, Average Daily Rate (ADR), and Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR) data directly from your PMS.

This enables you to improve your Revenue Generating Index (RGI) and get an edge on your competitors. Since you have all of these metrics in a single dashboard you get straight to the answers you need for strategic decisions making without the time-consuming analysis.

Benchmark Insight closes the competitive data loop, ensuring you are always actively strategizing for the future, not just reacting to the past. It transforms benchmarking from a static, historical report card into an engine for full-circle competitive intelligence.

The platform's most compelling features redefine your competitive analysis and unlock new opportunities by providing insights into your true competition:

• Forward-looking ADR and RevPAR: Unlike traditional tools that provide a historical view, Benchmark Insight offers predictive ADR and RevPAR data, to show you what's projected to happen in the coming weeks and months.

This crucial foresight allows you to proactively adjust your strategy to maintain or improve your position before it’s too late.

• The AI-powered Smart Compset: This industry-first dynamic compset is a direct solution to the problem of outdated, static competitor lists. The AI algorithm generates a relevant, anonymized compset that reflects consumer buying behavior and dynamically adjusts to real-time market shifts. The algorithm selects properties based on a wide range of data points, including consumer search and booking behavior, pricing patterns, hotel size, distance, review scores, and star ratings.

This gives you a more accurate comparison than a manually selected compset, helping you understand your performance in the context of your competitors that consumers are comparing you to.

You also have the power to customize the selection criteria based on what matters most to you, ensuring the compset aligns with your strategic goals and operational needs.

This powerful tool works in synergy with the forward-looking demand data provided by Market Insight, enabling you to analyze the correlation between forecasted demand and materialized bookings.

By uniting these insights with your on-the-books data, you can maximize your market share and gain a holistic view of your competitive landscape, all in one place.

Unlocking full-circle competitive intelligence with Lighthouse

True competitive intelligence goes beyond static data; it's about gaining a full-circle view of your business performance to make proactive, confident commercial decisions from pricing to sales and marketing.

When you combine Rate, Market, and Benchmark Insight in a unified platform, you can eliminate data silos and gain the strategic clarity needed to directly impact your bottom line and secure your competitive position.

This powerful, integrated workflow allows you to:

• Anticipate future demand 365 days in advance with Market Insight's predictive data.

• Set the optimal rates and promotions based on data from Rate Insight.

• Measure the success of your revenue strategy with Benchmark Insight, so you can spot competitive trends and accelerate your revenue growth.

Your compensation is often directly tied to your benchmark position, yet without the right tools, you are left to manage this crucial aspect of your role with one hand tied behind your back.

This competitive intelligence loop empowers you and your teams to make smarter, faster decisions, ultimately driving up your RGI and helping you achieve superior commercial performance.

Ready to lead your market?

If you’re using the industry's best tool for rate shopping, you are already one step ahead of your competition. To then establish market leadership, you should complete your competitive intelligence toolkit and enhance your Lighthouse experience with unique forward-looking insights.

Get in touch today to stop relying solely on what has happened and start proactively shaping your future success.