Customer Spotlight: Days Hospitality

About Days Hospitality

Based in Ontario, Canada, Days Hospitality is a privately held company focused on the development and management of their wholly-owned hotels and restaurants. Since being founded in 1990, the company has grown its portfolio to include four hotels and five restaurants in Alberta and British Columbia. Further projects are in the pipeline for Ontario. 

Recently we spoke with Mary Jane Hannah, VP of Operations and Project Management at Days Hospitality and the company’s hotel managers. Mary shared details about how Lighthouse’s suite of business and market intelligence tools allows her team to uncover new opportunities for their business strategy, keep an eye on their competition and save countless hours on manual data collection.

Seizing revenue opportunities in dynamic markets

While our four hotels each have different target audiences, they all have one thing in common:  competitive, dynamic markets. We used to have a system which emailed us a list of our compset’s rates once a week. As soon as a property changed their prices, the numbers we had to base our pricing decisions on were outdated. This meant we needed to do manual spot checks if we wanted to be confident in our commercial decisions. Since this took us extra time, we often missed out on revenue-generating opportunities. 

With Rate Insight, we have our competitors’ rate information at our fingertips whenever we need it. A single click on the dashboard is enough to see their rate changes in real time and know whether we need to make changes of our own. This gives us more flexibility, allows us to react within seconds and gives us confidence in our data-driven decisions. Without Rate Insight we would never be able to stay on top of ever-changing market rates. 

Finally, Rate Insight’s parity tab gives us an overview of where our rooms are being sold and at which rates. It flags rate disparity cases and we quickly act on them to ensure rate parity across all channels.

Improved positioning and strong market share

With Rate Insight, we can easily switch from one channel or competitor to another and explore various arrival dates in just a few clicks. This detailed understanding of our Comp Set’s pricing enables us to perfectly maintain our positioning. The tool allows us to understand our competition and if there’s a trend or a gap to find, this platform will help you do it!

Especially in saturated, dynamic markets, Rate Insight’s real-time information gives us an advantage over our Comp Set and helps us remain competitive. This has kept our market share strong and often results in us getting more than our fair share of business.

Saving valuable time by reducing manual work

Before using Lighthouse, everything was a manual process. It took us hours to shop competitor rates, collect and verify data before we could make decisions. Now, we work much more efficiently because we have access to real-time insights and can always rely on the data being accurate. We’ve also done away with several daily and monthly Excel reports because we can now pull them directly from the platform. 

Overall, Rate Insight saves us at least 90 hours per property annually because we no longer have to do manual rate shops. Business Intelligence has slashed the time we spend on reporting and data collation by a minimum of 100 hours per hotel every year. This leaves our teams with more time to focus on strategizing and other relevant tasks.

Enhanced performance overview

Prior to using Business Intelligence, we manually went through our PMS data to collect performance insights. This cost us a lot of time and still left us with open questions. Business Intelligence has proven to be a game changer in this regard. It allows us to filter data and drill down on very specific segmentation and performance information which reveals the gaps or opportunities in our business strategy. 

The tool lets us dive deep into the specifics of our business such as top-selling rates, the booking window, where our guests come from and how long they stay. We can also see if we are selling too many or too few rooms via certain channels or under specific segments and can correct course as needed. 

Business Intelligence also takes the guesswork out of negotiating with our clients and setting our rates. It gives quick access to filtered information about an account which includes data such as day of week, length of stay, room type preference, booking source and more. This helps our sales team to be more strategic when negotiating annual rates.

More productive internal communication

Since Days Hospitality manages four distinct hotels in different markets, it was challenging to align the reporting, especially given the varying property sizes and staffing levels. 

The head office team regularly had to ask detailed follow-up questions to get the insights required to provide appropriate guidance. This resulted in extra work for the on-property staff who had to manually create reports on segments, accounts, booking windows or room types. 

Now, the head office and hotel managers can directly access the latest data via Rate and Business Intelligence. This has allowed us to have more productive, positive and fluid conversations regarding driving revenue.

A user-friendly one-stop-shop

Lighthouse’s suite of business and market intelligence tools combines the four different solutions we had before in a single easy-to-use platform. Now we can quickly access the data we need in one window.

Our team no longer has to run several apps and manually piece together information from various sources. And not having to hunt for figures anymore speeds up our work and leaves us more time and energy for other important tasks.

A word to your peers

Lighthouse’s tools are user-friendly, low maintenance and very dynamic. Making just one or two strategic rate changes based on their data will cover your investment. Every hotelier who wants to be successful, save time and be more efficient needs to have these tools. And if Lighthouse keeps developing its platform with the same effort and quality, we look forward to what is coming next.