Hotel benchmarking in practice: From insight to action

It’s a vital tool for understanding your competitive performance compared to the market. But in many properties, this practice hasn’t evolved fast enough. 

Too often, benchmarking relies on outdated data, rigid compsets, and reports that arrive too late to act on. When that’s the case, the data may confirm what you already suspected, but only after the window to respond has closed.

Worse still, the information you often need is scattered across siloed platforms, making it hard to see the full picture. That leads to slow decisions, limited visibility, and missed opportunities to protect or grow your RevPAR.

This blog shows how Lighthouse’s state-of-the-art solution, Benchmark Insight, works in practice. It’s forward-looking, flexible, and built to help hoteliers take action in real time.

When connected with other Lighthouse tools like Business Intelligence, Market Insight, and Rate Insight, it becomes a foundation for a confident, coordinated commercial strategy.

Combined, they give you one place to see performance and act on it, eliminating the need to switch between systems and making your day-to-day processes more streamlined and efficient.

What to look for in a hotel benchmarking tool

A benchmarking solution built for this kind of strategy must be powerful enough to surface early signals of risk, pinpoint the root causes of underperformance, and enable you to act on those insights instantly, especially given the intense competition for business that hotels face. This is made possible by:

• Fresh, forward-looking data. Daily (or even more frequent) refreshes and visibility into future pickup, pace, and demand.

• Dynamic, criteria-based compsets. Ability to build compsets around what travelers actually consider (e.g., location, review score, distance to places of interest, amenities, price point), not just brand or class, and to keep them updated over time.

• Actionable drill-downs. Fast paths from topline gaps to root causes with segmentation, channel, and length-of-stay views, so you know what to do next.

• Speed and clarity. An interface that surfaces the signal (outliers, trend shifts, index movements) without trawling through spreadsheets.

• One workspace, many connections. Integrations with PMS and revenue tools so you can move from insight to action without hopping between disconnected systems.

• Data stewardship. Anonymized and privacy-safe benchmarking that still provides forward-looking KPIs like ADR, RevPAR, and occupancy.

Benchmark Insight checks these boxes and ties them together into one dashboard. It combines forward-looking performance data, dynamic Smart Compsets, and daily updates with the ability to make changes to your strategy across the entire platform. This means you are not just observing, you’re also diagnosing and taking action. Using a few illustrative scenarios, let’s see how that might look in practice.

Fixing a lagging date before it drags down your results

A revenue manager logs into Benchmark Insight and notices something unusual: For the following month, their property is consistently outperforming the compset in RevPAR, except for two midweek dates. On those two dates, the Revenue Generation Index (RGI) dips below 100, indicating underperformance. 

Rather than wait until the month-end report confirms a missed target, the revenue manager acts immediately.

Step 1: Pinpoint the weak spots with date-level filters

In Benchmark Insight, the revenue manager uses the calendar and graph view to break performance down by day. This makes it easy to spot outliers like those underperforming dates. A quick scan of the Performance Overview Table confirms it: Both dates have lower Occupancy and ADR than the compset, which is pulling down RevPAR.

The tool’s visualizations make this clear; color-coded difference ribbons show exactly where and when performance is slipping.

Step 2: Use segmentation to understand what’s missing

Next, the revenue manager drills into segmentation using Business Intelligence. Group business, usually a strong driver of midweek demand, is noticeably absent. Transient is holding steady, but not enough to close the gap. This confirms the issue: Without group bookings, occupancy is soft and transient alone won’t fill it.

Step 3: Compare with market-wide demand signals

To understand whether this is an isolated problem or a market-wide trend, the revenue manager checks the Market tab in the Lighthouse platform. City demand is lower than usual for those dates, but a nearby area is showing stronger forward bookings, suggesting guests are actually booking, just not this particular property.

That rules out a broad demand issue and points to positioning.

Step 4: Re-check pricing in the context of the compset

The rate tab in the Lighthouse platform shows the hotel’s ADR is still slightly higher than key competitors for those nights. In a softer demand environment, that price gap, while small, could be enough to shift bookings elsewhere. The revenue manager decides to lower rates slightly and pairs it with a midweek offer targeting transient guests.

Step 5: Share updates and keep tracking

The team is updated on the findings and the new pricing action. Benchmark Insight becomes the go-to tool for tracking the impact the adjustment makes. Because the data refreshes daily, the revenue manager doesn’t have to wait a week to know if it’s effective; pickup and index movement are visible the next day.

By spotting risk ahead of time and tying it to context from other tools within the Lighthouse commercial platform, the team creates a window to act strategically, rather than retrospectively explain a miss.

Pinpointing the segments that need your attention now

A hotelier is reviewing their competitive performance ahead of a three-week stretch that includes a public holiday weekend. On the surface, top-line performance looks steady. But narrowing the view to just the upcoming public holiday weekend tells a different story. For transient guests booking two-night stays, both occupancy share, or Market Penetration Index (MPI), and Average Rate Index (ARI) are trailing competitors.

Overall RGI hasn’t moved yet; weekday strength is masking the holiday weekend softness. But the risk is clear and, left unchecked, it could erode weekend results and overall share.

Step 1: Focus in on the high-risk dates

With Benchmark Insight’s drag-to-filter function in the Performance Overview, the revenue manager highlights just the public holiday weekend on the chart. The dashboard instantly updates to show only those dates, making it easy to separate the weekend’s softer transient performance from the stronger weekdays around it.

Step 2: Hone in on what’s affecting performance

Benchmark Insight’s filters allow the revenue manager to narrow the view to the exact segments, booking patterns, or stay lengths they want to assess. In seconds, they can see whether the gap is coming from short leisure stays, extended business trips, specific room types, or another demand driver. This makes it easier to understand which part of the mix is underperforming and focus efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

In this case, filtering by length of stay reveals the softness is concentrated in two-night transient bookings, a pattern often linked to leisure travelers looking for quick getaways. That points to an opportunity for targeted weekend promotions, rather than a broad rate change affecting all guest types.

Step 3: Align actions with the opportunity

Knowing the gap is in short-stay leisure, the revenue manager works with marketing to launch a limited-time weekend package, timed to align with booking windows for that segment. 

Step 4: Track the impact and adapt quickly

The revenue manager can monitor whether occupancy share and rate position for those dates start to improve after the promotion goes live. If performance stays flat, they can shift tactics by adjusting rates, extending the offer, or targeting a different audience to protect share. Again, all within the same platform.

Finding unseen group opportunities with a dynamic compset

A hotelier is planning for a midweek period three months in advance. The booking pace is slow, but the property’s performance looks steady against its traditional compset. However, a hunch tells the revenue manager that something is off. Rather than accepting this softness as a market reality, they leverage the flexibility of Benchmark Insight's Smart Compset to find new opportunities.

Step 1: Identify emerging competitors with Smart Compset

The revenue manager decides to create a new, dynamic Smart Compset. Instead of relying on a fixed list of properties, they use the Smart Compset builder to prioritize factors like city center proximity, base rate, and amenities over a simple star rating or hotel class. The AI-powered algorithm generates an anonymized list of competitors that are most relevant to today's guest search behavior. This reveals a significant detail: The property is actually performing well against its traditional competitors, but a new set of competitors is capturing a large portion of the market's demand for those specific dates.

Step 2: Investigate the demand drivers 

By examining the forward-looking data in Benchmark Insight, the revenue manager notices that this newly identified Smart Compset is showing a strong pickup in group occupancy and an increase in ADR for a specific midweek period. This indicates a major event or conference is taking place that their property, and their old compset, were missing. This is the crucial signal that tells the revenue manager where to focus their efforts.

Step 3: Align sales strategy with the new insights 

Armed with this new information, the revenue manager can immediately take action. They share the insights with their sales team, proving that while their historical competitors may be quiet, there's a huge opportunity with this new segment. The sales team uses this intelligence to create a targeted outreach campaign, reaching out to potential group clients who are likely organizing events for those specific dates. They can confidently position their hotel against the true competitive landscape, rather than one that has no other common traits other than its proximity or star rating.

Step 4: Track progress and adjust instantly 

As the sales team works to secure bookings, the revenue manager uses Benchmark Insight to monitor their property's pace against the Smart Compset. If adjustments are needed, they can quickly move to the rate tab and adjust their offer.

The new era of benchmarking: From scorecard to strategy

Tracking numbers is one thing, but true success in the hotel sector comes from turning those numbers into insights and those insights into a strategy that helps you win over your fair share of the market. 

Lighthouse's Benchmark Insight simplifies how you analyze and act on data. By turning complex datasets into clear, actionable insights, it helps you focus on what matters most: improving performance and staying ahead of the competition.

As the scenarios demonstrate, Benchmark Insight is far more than a static scorecard. It’s the solution to fragmented workflows, stale data and outdated compsets. By integrating both historical and forward-looking data, you can spot trends early and make swift, confident adjustments, transforming you from a reactive reporter to a proactive strategist.

And because Benchmark Insight is part of the Lighthouse platform, there’s no need to hop between disconnected tools and spreadsheets. Instead, you have a single source of truth where you can move directly from an insight to an action within the same dashboard – combining clarity with simplicity – to align your team and ensure all your strategic decisions are grounded in data. 

Want to see it in action? Give it a try.