Customer Spotlight: Wythe Hotel

About Wythe Hotel

Set in one of Brooklyn’s formerly industrial neighborhoods, Wythe Hotel has given an old barrel and rope factory a new lease of life. The 70-room boutique hotel reflects the building’s rich history and offers guests contemporary, artsy rooms, some of which overlook the East River and the Manhattan skyline. The Le Crocodile restaurant and the rooftop Bar Blondeau complete the hotel’s offering. 

Recently we sat down with Will Jordan, Director of Revenue Management, Sales & Marketing at Wythe Hotel. He shared how he uses Lighthouse’s Business Intelligence to streamline his workflow and gain a deeper understanding of his property’s performance.

Saving time by simplifying processes

Before using Business Intelligence, we handled all data collection and collation manually. That included checking competitor rates one by one as well as going through cumbersome PMS reports to understand our performance. The most time-consuming task was gathering data from multiple sources to create the in-depth Excel reports we used to evaluate our business results. Especially as a small property without a dedicated revenue manager, this time-intensive approach caused challenges. It was always a balancing act to ensure all fronts were covered and no tasks were overlooked. 

Implementing Business Intelligence has helped us drastically simplify our data collection and reporting process. We’ve cut the time we spend on this in half since the platform gives us real-time access to accurate performance data in just a few clicks.

Deeper insights into performance data

Since we spend less time collecting and collating data, we now have more capacity to analyze and act on it. For example, Business Intelligence reveals the production of various segments, rates, room types or weekdays at the click of a button. As a result, we can quickly spot if an area is underperforming. Then, we immediately take the necessary actions to avoid losing out on business. 

Business Intelligence has also allowed us to learn more about our property and its performance overall. Since the tool puts so many detailed insights at our fingertips, we’ve started going deeper into the data. This gives us a well-rounded understanding of our key revenue drivers, the gaps and opportunities in our business strategy. This has helped us become more deliberate in our approach to pricing, sales and marketing.

More productive communication with management

When we meet with the owner and senior management to discuss our results and strategy, we want to present our data in a clear and concise format. In the past, the only way to do that was to manually compile Excel spreadsheets from bulky PMS reports. This took a lot of time and sometimes even the most in-depth spreadsheets couldn’t provide the level of insights we wanted. 

With Business Intelligence, we can pull data for any time period, segment, rate or distribution channel whenever we want. It’s even possible to open the dashboard during a meeting and share live insights directly from the platform. This makes it much easier for us to share our results and provide background information on recent decisions and business trends. In short, our conversations around revenue strategy have become more productive and data-driven.

User-friendly system and seamless integrations

We recently undertook the massive project of updating our entire tech stack. One thing we kept a keen eye on was ensuring our various new systems (e.g., PMS, channel manager, booking engine…) integrated well with each other. Business Intelligence stood out in this regard since it connected to our PMS so seamlessly. That’s a far cry from our past set-up where disconnected systems caused a lot of friction and extra manual work. Now that’s a thing of the past and we know our data flows freely between systems without our help. 

Its ease of use is another reason Business Intelligence has proven itself as the right choice for us. The tool’s user interface and navigation are so intuitive, we immediately know how to use it. We were able to get the data we needed in just a few clicks from the first day. Having tested other business intelligence tools, I think Business Intelligence is the most straightforward solution. It does the best job at making data accessible and presenting it in a clear format. I wouldn’t want to go back to working without it.

A word to your peers

I recommend Business Intelligence to fellow revenue professionals because the platform makes it so easy to find answers to even the most complex queries. Of course, the time it saves you is also an important factor. Finally, it comes at a reasonable price point which is quickly offset by the time it saves and the good decisions it will help you make. All these aspects make Business Intelligence extremely attractive to smaller properties which find legacy systems too elaborate and inaccessible.