How Revenue Managers Win With Lighthouse Market Insight

With technological advancements like dynamic pricing, rates change hourly. Mega-events like Formula 1, Taylor Swift concerts and even solar eclipses create unbelievable temporary demand surges. Add to this mix the power of social media influencers that turn destinations into overnight sensations, furious supply additions, macro-economic and geo-political trends, and you begin to understand why hoteliers must monitor market trends daily to avoid surprises and remain in control of their commercial destiny.

For those hoteliers who use a commercial intelligence tool like Lighthouse’s Market Insight, understanding forward looking indicators is now easier than ever, but it’s important to periodically give yourself a refresher on how to get the most out of the tool so you can continue to outperform the compset. For those who aren’t yet users of Market Insight, this quick guide will also give you an idea of what indicators you should be monitoring at your property, and what features you should look for in a demand intelligence tool.

What is Lighthouse Market Insight?

Market Insight is a real-time market intelligence solution designed to help hotels and other travel businesses understand and forecast market demand. It provides actionable insights into booking intent, competitor behavior, and upcoming trends, enabling users to make informed pricing and revenue management decisions. 

Market Insight is a first in the commercial strategy space - it combines Lighthouse’s best-in-class rate shopping data along with flight and hotel search-data, hotel occupancy data and short term rental availability which in turn creates powerful demand indicators that allow hoteliers to monitor demand as it evolves, and spot opportunity dates with ease.

If you want to skip straight to more information about the product, check out Market Insight directly on our website, or keep reading to see how hotel revenue managers are winning more occupancy, ADR and RevPAR with the product.

Forecast and visualize demand patterns

One of the hardest aspects of analyzing hospitality industry data is the sheer volume of data, and the ever-changing nature of travel trends. It’s a tall order to organize and visualize the datasets effectively, and if you don’t have the right tools it can lead to suboptimal forecasting and missed opportunities. 

Here are a few example challenges revenue managers might face when analyzing demand.

• A revenue manager may know that the month of October is historically one of their strongest months, but they may not know exactly how to maximize on the demand.

• A major sports event is coming up soon. The anticipated attendance is 80,000 people, but the revenue manager isn't sure how far the demand will radiate from the stadium, and how long these guests want to stay.

The first challenge is quite broad. We’re looking to understand demand in a very comprehensive way to unlock insights that will allow us to maximize our performance over an extended period.

The second challenge is more focused. We’ve got a specific stay date with an event, and we’re looking to answer more pointed questions regarding geography and stay patterns.

Thankfully Market Insight allows us to do both types of analysis with ease. Let’s take a look at how we might address both challenges, and which tools we use within the platform for each.

Identify and respond to evolving travel trends

Revisiting the first example, let’s look at the ways Market Insight allows revenue managers and commercial strategists to spot trends over large time frames.

The most effective way to perform this kind of analysis is by utilizing the Market outlook view. By selecting the entire month of October we can see all days from a demand and price perspective.

There is a wealth of information to glean from just this view. We can see that while October is a strong month, it’s not all rosy. There are periods of low demand (shown by the blue bars), several opportunity dates (indicated by the circular icons), and the only period of extremely high demand being the closing days of the month.

Our revenue manager now has a much better idea of which days specifically they can expect to maximize on demand, but let’s go a step further. There are 3 specific opportunity dates within the month where Market Insight is proactively alerting the user that there is an anomaly, and strategy can be optimized further.

When we hover over the first opportunity date alert, we get more details: we are overpriced based on demand signals for our market. While Meta/OTA search volume for flights is higher-than-average, overall demand levels remain unchanged from last week’s elevated level. By lowering our current rate of $247 we could potentially capture more revenue.

With just this view, a revenue manager now better understands where demand is weak and strong throughout the entire month, while also generating a short-list of opportunity dates.

Be the first to adjust when special events are announced

Next, let’s revisit the second challenge: the times when a revenue manager needs a quick but focused view of a single night’s demand trends. Special events often warrant this level of detailed analysis. Thankfully for us, Market Insight allows for this granular daily view.

By selecting a single date from the Market Outlook page, we are then brought to a more focused dashboard that includes a demand evolution heatmap, as well as more details about pricing, demand, search data, and occupancy.

It can be extremely valuable to know where impact is affecting your market. For example, small events may not fully compress the entire market, and may lead to overpricing if you are over-optimistic about an event’s rate potential.

The heatmap feature allows us to understand what geographic areas within our market are experiencing demand, at what times.

In addition to the heatmap, Market Insight allows users to look at a variety of indicators that are affecting the single date in question, including: demand indicators, price distribution, and recent search data with Searched length of stay and Top searching countries. 

When a revenue manager or commercial strategist is able to drill-down to this level of detail for a single date of interest, more custom-tailored strategies for special events like mega concerts can be implemented. By understanding how long guest’s desired length of stay patterns are, and where guests are searching from (especially when combined with other supplementary market data like short-term rental availability data), you can quickly implement an effective pricing and promotional strategy that will maximize revenue.

Make data-driven decisions about your pricing strategy

One of the major challenges that revenue managers face when determining pricing strategy is that the various inputs that improve decision-making are scattered across various ‘silos’. A revenue manager without the right tools may have to pull a rate shop, on the books, pickup report, and an event calendar from 4 different sources (rms, pms, business intelligence tool, rate shop) before making a pricing decision.

Thankfully Market Insight (and the entire Lighthouse platform) incorporate best-in-class competitor pricing data from Rate Insight that allows you to quickly assess the effectiveness of your pricing strategy in one simple view.

Other features, such as event data from Rate Insight, and other statistics such as short term rental availability, and price level distribution seamlessly feed back and forth between the various Lighthouse products, meaning that a user doesn’t have to scramble between reports or separate data sources to put the full demand and pricing puzzle together. This means that pricing decisions are both more accurate, and more efficient. Less wasted time and more optimal pricing decisions quickly translates to more profit.

Optimize your distribution, marketing, and sales strategies

The search data included in Market Insight is full of clues to improving distribution, marketing, and sales strategy as well. Key indicators such as: Search level, Searched length-of-stay, and Top searching countries are metrics that are actionable by the entire commercial strategy team. We touched on these features briefly above, but let’s explore how sales, marketing, and distribution can utilize each:

Search Level

Use Search level to understand how much flight and or search volume is occurring through OTA / Meta / GDS channels, and whether this demand is above or below typical averages for any given day of week. When combined with the overall demand indicator, this gives you an idea whether it is necessary to sell on certain channels, or whether you can close certain channels out entirely, to increase direct bookings.

Searched length of stay

Searched LOS gives you an idea of how long guests are intending to stay, which in turn allows you to focus on the channels that are most lucrative for that stay-pattern. You may want to put more marketing dollars behind those channels that provide longer average length of stay if you notice an uptick in searches for that stay pattern.

Top searching countries

Understanding which countries of origin your guests are booking from is invaluable from a marketing perspective. Abnormal trends can signal where marketing dollars are best spent. For example, if you notice a major drop off from your most common feeder country, it could signal that it’s time to run a targeted promotion for that country or region.

Using Market Insight, especially when paired with other Lighthouse tools like Distribution Insight, or Business Intelligence can provide even more insight into exactly where your demand is coming from so you can optimize your channel mix in the most profitable way, consistently and increase market share.

Forecast travel demand with greater accuracy

Market Insight is trusted by thousands of hoteliers worldwide, allowing them to better understand their demand and subsequently make better revenue strategy decisions, leading to more profitable outcomes. Lighthouse rate shopping, market intelligence, and benchmarking tools continue to rank #1 for hoteliers worldwide thanks to a combination of reliable data, and award-winning support.

If you own, operate, or manage commercial strategy for a hotel of any size and want to better understand demand, Market Insight is likely a tool that will take your current analysis to the next level, unlocking more revenue opportunities regularly.

If you want to learn more, or see the tool in action, don’t hesitate to talk to someone on the Lighthouse team today.