Customer Spotlight: Highgate

About Highgate

With 30 years of experience investing in and managing hospitality assets, Highgate is an industry leader that operates more than 125 hotels with 30,000 rooms worldwide. The company’s diverse portfolio runs the gamut from legacy brands to luxury boutique hotels, and multiple award-winning properties attest to a stellar reputation.

On the east coast of the United States, the Highgate portfolio includes but is not limited to The Knickerbocker, Royalton New York, and Row NYC in New York City, as well as the Boston Park Plaza and Celino South Beach Miami.

The company is known for embracing new ideas in hotel management and pioneering the use of technological solutions. Highgate uses fresh insight into hotel trends to apply a winning set of principles to diverse properties, boosting performance across its portfolio.

Our Challenge

As a group, we have multiple properties that often receive information requests. We might get a call from management or ownership asking to see data on which source markets business is coming from, and whether they have changed year-on-year.

It can be seriously time-consuming to deal with these requests, so cutting down on the number of clicks and different systems we use to find answers is a priority.

Keeping on top of multiple channels and maintaining parity is a challenge for every hotel manager. With multiple properties to think about, it’s even more difficult. We needed a tool that would make this easier and allow us to identify parity issues and work out what we should do about them.

Another priority was being able to keep tabs on the competition through improved business intelligence capabilities, as well as identifying fluctuations in demand and opportunities to move business from lower-rated channels into higher-rated segments.

Looking at trends in ADR is also something that we were keen to be able to do.

The Solution

Both Rate Insight and Business Intelligence are intuitive and provide insights quickly and efficiently. All of the data is presented in a kind of one-stop shop, which is more efficient than other tools we have used in the past, and it’s easy to dive into specific details. You can drill down into market segmentation, rate codes and length of stay remarkably easily.

We found that Lighthouse is great at identifying smaller OTAs that our properties randomly pop up on, so we can quickly take action to ensure that we are in parity across all channels.

It also identifies fluctuations in demand, and the Rate Insight shopping tool saves time by entering data from Expedia or Booking.com into an Excel spreadsheet.

For multi-property managers like myself, Lighthouse improves communication between teams by making sure that all of the data you need is easily accessible.

It really takes the stress out of managing a multitude of data sets.

Our Results

Concrete results thanks to great data

Any business intelligence solution relies on good data and we have found that Lighthouse Business Intelligence provides relevant information quickly and easily.

The tools help us make better business decisions by drilling down into different market segments and acting on the insights that they provide.

One example are major negative parity variances that are found on specific channels, which we can decide what to do with quickly.

At one 200-room Lighthouse Business Intelligence beta test property in our portfolio, we recorded a 7.4% increase in RGI over the last six months of 2017.

That is equivalent to a $400,000 increase, which came from shifting business from lower-rated channels to higher-rated segments.

These kinds of results speak for themselves and Lighthouse Business Intelligence is becoming an essential tool within our company.

Efficient and stress-free for multiple properties

In addition to its intuitive and efficient design, Lighthouse makes it easy to compare multiple properties from our group. I can quickly see how each hotel is priced and switch between them easily to spot whether they are aligned or seeing similar trends in terms of rates.

The major benefit is that this information can be accessed with a click of a button instead of searching through different systems. I can quickly access the data points I need in real-time, saving time and stress and accessing fresh data.

Lighthouse has been a wonderful partner to us and the efficiency of the product has been amazing. I would highly recommend it.

Great working relationship

The customer support at Lighthouse is tremendous, and the people that I interact with have been extremely helpful and quick to respond to our needs.

We hardly ever have any issues with the platform, but if we do have a question, the staff are friendly and seem like they’re out to make sure we’re getting what we need from the product. It’s been a real pleasure working with Lighthouse compared to other technology companies we have used in the past.

Lighthouse Business Intelligence is another fantastic product from the company and the interface is so intuitive no matter which tool you are using. I have come to rely on the tool when I need to get specific data points from multiple hotels in front of me right away, saving time over clunky reporting procedures that usually have to take place at different properties.

With Lighthouse Business Intelligence, you get the right data in front of you quickly and easily.

It seems to me that in the future Lighthouse Business Intelligence could also be useful for sales teams, who would be able to see if a particular agency is falling behind on booking pace before quickly targeting them to maximize business.