Customer Spotlight: Silverado Resort and Spa
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“We have had to get even smarter about understanding our customer demographics, and that's where Lighthouse Business Intelligence has proved invaluable.”
About Silverado Resort and Spa
Silverado Resort and Spa is a luxury hotel in the heart of the world-famous Napa Valley, featuring fine dining, two PGA championship golf courses, tennis, a 16,000ft spa, and a variety of rooms. The Silverado Resort sits just an hour north of San Francisco and is in the heart of Napa wine country, neighboring more than 400 wineries.
We sat down with David Gill, who has been Director of Revenue Management at Silverado Resort and Spa for three and a half years, to understand how he and his team have benefited from using Rate Insight and Lighthouse Business Intelligence. Read on to learn how Lighthouse's intelligent business tools have facilitated more accurate decision-making for the commercial teams at Silverado Resort and Spa.
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"You need complete data accuracy, and you get that with Lighthouse Business Intelligence, pulling data directly from your PMS system."
Timesaving and agile decision-making
When I moved to Silverado in Napa, we were using another product initially. Having used Lighthouse's tools at past properties, I was a major advocate. Hence, we quickly transitioned to Rate Insight in my first year of joining. We then moved to Lighthouse BI as well, about two months ago.
With other tools on the market, you're not able to see quick snapshots of combined pricing and index versus sales. You have to run many reports and combine them in a manual process to get to where you want to see your data. With Lighthouse BI, you have price insights within the tool when measuring ADR. This allows a combination of sales and indexing on the price side, to make quicker decisions.
You can then quickly evaluate the length of stay, which channels are working best, and how to effectively move between pricing decisions to shift channel contributions. Lighthouse BI gives you all the critical factors for revenue positioning in one platform. Fully automated reporting allows us to become far more agile in decision-making.
Rate Insight is a very user-friendly tool. You can see everything on one dashboard with the different coloured boxes. It displays all the essential elements of decision-making, from the length of stay to channel source, routing type, and productivity. You can then compare that against your forecast and budget in one platform. It's an excellent tool that has allowed us to get to a place where we're almost entirely automated.
Complete price indexing
One thing we pride ourselves on is price indexing. Finding the measurement that enables you to properly position your hotel on a day-to-day basis against a core competitive set. Sometimes, because of the hotel we are, we're not able to compare against, say, a 100-room hotel in the city of Napa. We have to look for other property types as well.
With Rate Insight, we can create an environment that allows us to price index against the averages of a competitive set. We can create a pricing index for any given day, so each day of the week, I can see my average base price against this competitive set to move a certain volume of rooms. This is absolutely critical to our decision-making.
From a macro point of view, with the monthly reporting, we can dive in and see how we performed against the positioning we put in place from an index perspective. We can analyze this and ask ourselves if we need to adjust that daily indexing seasonally or by month to determine which direction we need to take to hit our goals.
We have only been using Lighthouse BI for the past 60 days, so it's been fine-tuning what that macro view looks like. But the first core competency is making sure that you have the daily index pricing in place to measure productivity against it and go from there.
"We've been using Rate Insight for two years, and it's safe to say that due to the pricing intelligence we get out of it, we see a five, to seven, to one return on the cost that's fully measured."
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Immediate reporting, paired with precise data
Rate Insight has two features that immediately jump out. One is the instant shop function, which is something I need every day at Silverado Resort. The second is automated reporting, and the fact that it's instantaneous is fantastic. If I want to run a quick 365 look, it's right there. I don't have to wait for an email. I can export and download right away. I can immediately go in and pull our performance both in parity and pricing.
With Lighthouse BI, there were a couple of things that really stood out to me. Typically, with other tools, channel performance can be a bit cumbersome to obtain, and you have to create automated reports that are not necessarily built out for all brands. Also, they're not pulling from your PMS system. They're pulling from your CRS system.
Now, having a channel contribution performance report directly out of our PMS means that we can rely on the data that's being sent out and being finalized on our profit and loss statement. You need complete data accuracy, and you get that with Lighthouse BI, pulling data directly from your PMS system.
The second thing is the room-type performance report. Before, I had to build manual reporting to determine the productivity of room type, but with Lighthouse BI, it is already built-in. I can see exactly which resort category room types I'm selling across any given time period. This is a critical component for a resort like Silverado, which has 27 room types classified into 13 different categories.
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"When Lighthouse BI was brought forth, we had the flexibility to immediately separate and understand what booking behavior was taking place."
Optimizing ROI when budgets and time are tight
We're about 60 days in with Lighthouse BI, and we can see operational hard dollar improvements in time. I have a revenue analyst who no longer has to put two hours into building a report. She pulls up Lighthouse BI, goes into the system, measures the day-over-day productivity, and makes immediate decisions.
That's two hours on any given day saved, which is incredibly valuable at the moment. That's a hard dollar expense that we get back pretty quickly - it's allowed a faster return in decision-making, which has its own ROI.
We've been using Rate Insight for two years, and It's safe to say that due to the pricing intelligence we get out of it, we see a five, to seven-to-one return on the cost that's fully measured. Five to seven to one is a pretty quick return. The price value matches the cost compared to other companies that aren't as integrated. The cost for an integrated tool doesn't make sense for a property that needs something immediate, and that's where Rate Insight comes in.
