Customer Spotlight: Clarion Hotel Golden Horn

About Clarion Hotel Golden Horn

Set on the banks of the Golden Horn Strait, the Clarion Hotel features 185 rooms with private balconies overlooking the river and the city of Istanbul. Its central location in the heart of the Beyoglu district makes this property ideal for leisure guests who have come to explore Istanbul’s rich cultural and historical heritage as well as the city’s vibrant lifestyle destinations.

Drastically improved efficiency

When we came across Rate Insight and Lighthouse Business Intelligence, we were looking for one system we could use to monitor everything including our own revenue, our hotel’s history, changes in the market, holidays, local events and our competitors. After testing Lighthouse’s products, we knew they were exactly what we wanted to work with. 

Before using Lighthouse Business Intelligence, we spent a lot of time pulling data from Opera and manually compiling numbers from countless reports in large Excel spreadsheets with complicated macros. Overall, we spent about four hours a day on this which means a lot of time went by before we were able to analyze and act on the data we had collected. 

Our goal was to understand our performance and make smart pricing and distribution decisions, but our system needed to become faster. Now, with only a few clicks, we can get all the numbers we need presented in an easy-to-read format, complete with graphs and charts. This saves us four hours a day or half a workday, so if you look at it over a year, Lighthouse’s tools give us back 180 workdays a year. 

Accurate, clearly presented data

On top of saving us a lot of time, Lighthouse Business Intelligence has also made it much easier for us to access reliable, up-to-date information presented in a clear, visually appealing way. In a few short clicks, we can see all the most recent changes including demand, competitor rates and our revenue. It’s all on one page and we know that it’s accurate because our internal figures come directly from Opera and market information is updated whenever we hit refresh.

Lighthouse BI is also much more user-friendly than other tools on the market. Learning to use it is easy and decision-makers from all departments can quickly get the hang of it and benefit from the information it provides. The clear visuals summarize data perfectly and even team members with little revenue management experience can use it to make decisions. 

Seizing revenue-generating opportunities

Since our previous method of collecting and collating our data made our decision process very slow, we missed many opportunities in our market which led to a loss in revenues. Now that we can see the information we need instantly, we can focus on the areas which are most relevant and urgent for us and we can easily see where we are performing well and where we need to correct course. 

Having in-depth data available for our analysis has let us shift our focus to strategic decisions rather than having to focus on the process of data collection. Now that we have a better understanding of our market and our hotel’s performance, we can make much better pricing decisions. 

While it’s still a bit early to speak of our results, we have seen an increase in revenue since we started using Lighthouse’s business intelligence tools, our ADR has increased by 10% which is an excellent ROI for us. 

Market-leading, not following

The leisure travel segment, which makes up about 80% of our business, is highly dynamic in Istanbul. Many of our competitors update their rates several times a day and follow very aggressive revenue management and pricing strategies. Because we can see these changes immediately, we can better reflect them in our rates as well. Since Rate Insight and Lighthouse BI give us such a complete overview, we have become much more flexible and often lead the market. Now, our competitors follow us instead of it being the other way around. 

A word to the industry

To stay ahead of the competition, dynamic pricing and optimizing your processes is a must. The best way to do this effectively is to use Lighthouse’s tools. I encourage other revenue managers to consider its impressive ROI. Apart from improving our financial results, we have also been able to save a lot of manhours which is one of the biggest cost factors in hospitality. 

One day, all hotels will understand the power of using a cutting-edge BI suite. Until then, the hotels working with Lighthouse will get the biggest piece of the cake in their respective markets.