How to do a SWOT analysis for your hotel?
A SWOT analysis of your hotel helps you to identify the Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat that your business faces on any given day.
This tool is used to make strategies for the future and decide on action steps. You can do this exercise once a year while making the hotel budget or every 6 months to understand if there is any shift in the conditions
While strength and weakness are internal in nature, opportunities and threats can be external factors that may affect the hotel industry.
How is SWOT analysis made?
As the SWOT is a business comparison, the first thing is to understand who are you competing with. If you have not identified your compset, you must do that first before you begin this step.
Once you know who you are competing with, you should write down your key strengths and weakness. To help you with this, you could look to data that you have
- Guest feedback for the past few months
- Social media comments.
- Unique design or process
- Team strength or weakness
- Network, brand or referral power
As the strength and weakness discussion are internal, do not compare yourself with the competing hotels. Just your own reflection.
Then move on to the next step of Opportunities and Threats. In this stage, start with the macro view and then move to competition and what they may do to change the business opportunities available to your hotel.
Write down both positive and negative aspects of external factors
- Changes in the world that affect you
- Any change in policy that can help or harm the industry.
- New hotels or restaurants coming up in the vicinity
- Hotels closing for renovation
- New business districts opening
As you brainstorm points, keep writing.
Once you have written all the points, make a slide with all the points in the correct columns
Next Step
After you have made the analysis for your hotel, do the same for all you identified competitors.
Visit them, learn about their strengths and weakness from a guest perspective. Read their review and understand what are their weakness.
This is a crucial step. As you operate in a business environment, every decision by any competitor affects the market.
How SWOT analysis for your hotel helps with strategic planning?
As you get the information about your hotel and the competitors, you can plan to match the strength of your competitors. Or explore opportunities that exist in the market.
By using your strength and opportunities, you can build new products that can position you as the market leader.
By understanding weakness and threats you can retain your market share by brick walling your position
In conclusion
If done well, the swot analysis is a powerful tool that you can use. However in reality, mostly it is done as a tick in the box exercise.
The strategies identified are usually never considered due to the market demands or urgent and important needs.
If you can avoid that and keep focus on the document, you can achieve strategic gains for your hotel