How to set your Compset for your hotel?

Before we address the question of how to set the compset for your hotel, let us understand what is a Compset.

A group of hotels that your hotel may wish to compare results with so that you know if you are doing better or worse than them.

However the compset has a limitation of only comparing rooms and not the other facilities and food and beverage options.

Why do we need a compset ?

If you work in a branded hotel, or for a management company, often having a compset is a contractual obligation.

The management company will contract to perform within certain acceptable norms. Often there will be performance test based on compset performance.

The compset also helps us to compare like for like data, for example the occupancy and the ARR.

This helps us to derive the Revpar Index and helps us to know if we are doing better or worse than the competition.

How to set the compset for your hotel ?

For a compset to be truly useful you must ensure that you select hotels that are truly your competition.

That means, if a guest will not use your hotel, what is the next logical hotel the guest will book.

Categorization

That brings us to category. The first step is to identify which market you want to compete with.

• Luxury
• Upper Upscale
• Upscale
• Midscale
• Economy

These are categories based on STR – a 3rd party service – that collects these data and process them anonymously.

Once you have identified the category your hotel falls under, you need to do the the next level of selection.

Location

In order to be considered to be in your compset, identify hotels that are near you. For e.g if you are a downtown hotel, consider other downtown hotels. If you are a resort, compare with other resorts.

Business mix

If your market offers many hotels, you may have the luxury to choose and select your competition hotel based on business mix. What I mean by that is by selecting hotels that are closer to your business mix. If you have a hotel that has a higher focus on Group business, select hotels that may have a similar business mix.

In conclusion

Having a compset helps hotel to compete and compare information. Selecting your hotel compset is important so that you are comparing apple to apple.