The ultimate guide to business intelligence for hoteliers

Attention hoteliers: we’ve updated this guide for 2025 so you can shape the future of your hotel’s success in the new year, and beyond. Whether you’re looking to add a BI solution to your tech stack this year, are already utilizing a Business Intelligence tool, or just want to brush up on your BI tool knowledge, this guide will give you the information you need to make better decisions.

What is hotel business intelligence?

Hotel business intelligence refers to the process of collecting, tracking, analyzing, and understanding internal and external data to make informed revenue, sales, and distribution decisions.

Three data categories are necessary for a complete picture of your property's performance and opportunities:

1. Internal historical performance data: This includes basic KPIs such as occupancy, RevPAR, and ADR, but also more complex data such as historical market segment trends, pickup and pace trends, and any other metric that expresses final results. Examples of internal historical performance data include:

   • On October 20th 2022 we reached 94% occupancy (occupancy)

   • Same time last year, we had $146,414 room revenue on the books for December. (Pace)

   • Our market mix for last night was 22% OTA retail (market mix)
     

2. Internal forward-looking data: This includes any of the same metrics mentioned above, but for dates in the future. It's important to distinguish between the two types, as forward looking dates are not yet set in stone, and fluctuate based on various conditions. Examples of forward looking data include:

   • For an upcoming date we have seen room night pickup of 20 rooms in the past 7-days

   • Our demand forecast has increased an additional 12 room nights for tomorrow night

   • Our market mix is over 50% retail for next month.
     

3. External market trends: Examples include search volume for future arrival dates, pricing behavior (historical and for future dates future), and competitor rates.  When combined with your internal BI data sources, external market intelligence data adds context to your internal metrics and provides valuable reference points that influence decision making. Examples include:

   • The compset average rate has dropped $20 for next week, our demand forecast is also very soft, it will likely be a below-average-demand week.

   • Search volume from Germany and Spain has decreased by 50% year-over-year. Let’s consider running a targeted promotion in these markets.

The benefits of a hotel business intelligence system

Business intelligence helps identify opportunities to optimize strategies and increase revenue. This goes beyond simply seeing when to update your BAR rates. The benefits of a business intelligence platform are too numerous to fit in just one blog, but let’s list some key, concrete examples:

• Utilizing BI allows you to monitor whether specific market segments are booking in response to your latest promotion, giving valuable feedback on where to change your approach. 

• BI helps you decide which rates to offer groups and corporate partners, so you can maximize your key metrics of occupancy, ADR, and revenue/RevPAR on all fronts. You may know this as ‘displacement analysis’, which is only possible when you have the right data at your fingertips.

• Monitor pickup and cancellations for a major, future event date. Knowing this data allows you to adjust not only pricing but also yielding decisions, house policies, and marketing strategies.

• BI data allows you to set quantifiable goals, and then track your performance against those goals, in a process called budgeting. Without business intelligence, hoteliers are at risk of making decisions that aren’t in their best interests.

When you start utilizing business intelligence data, you’ll stop missing revenue opportunities and become better at adapting to today’s quickly developing markets. Get this right and you’ll not only gain a competitive advantage but increase your hotel’s overall revenue at the same time.

Understanding the evolving business intelligence landscape

We are now five-years post-pandemic and can confidently say that the hotel landscape has permanently changed. Characterized by lower staffing levels, changed guest mixes, upended demand patterns, and shifted traveler expectations.

In addition to these changes, hotel data has become increasingly complex. The adoption of new technologies has led to more frequent pricing and strategy changes. Hotels compete more with short term rentals, and revenue management departments are increasingly handling all aspects of commercial strategy.

In the coming years, Hoteliers need a more comprehensive approach to business intelligence, one that will help move them away from fragmented data sets and instead leverage comprehensive and consolidated information.

Additionally, commercial teams must share these insights and use them to form solid processes and adaptable strategies.

Before we get deeper into the how and what of business intelligence in the hotel industry, we’ll take a closer look at why it’s become such a critical tool since the pandemic.

Three key reasons are:

1. Changes in the sales mix and commercial strategies

2. A new need for more robust commercial services teams and strategies

3. The many ongoing challenges faced by sales, operations, and revenue departments when it comes to understanding hotel performance on a granular level

Changes in the sales mix and commercial strategies

The pandemic disrupted established demand patterns and sales mixes across the industry.

Despite a near-full recovery of leisure travel as early as 2021, business travel took much longer to recover, and is only anticipated to return to 2019 performance levels now, in Q4 of 2024. 

Add to the mix the proliferation of STR (Short term rental) listings on booking channels traditionally reserved for only hotels, and an generally increased complexity of the revenue management landscape, things have never been more competitive.

The need for robust commercial services teams

The hospitality industry experienced a significant workforce reduction during the pandemic, but has now largely recovered to its pre-pandemic levels of employment. That said, high inflation in the post covid world means that hotel owners and operators who have built their operations staff back up to a comfortable level are now worried about higher labor costs.

Revenue and sales teams also face challenges due to the loss of skilled colleagues.

New hires require a ramp-up period to effectively win clients and maximize revenue in the current market conditions. This involves learning about the property, understanding its standards and processes, familiarising themselves with key accounts, receiving training, and comprehending the market dynamics.

It's crucial to invest in training and support for new hires, as the pandemic has had lasting effects on the industry, prompting companies and leisure travelers to reevaluate their travel decisions.

How business intelligence tools help hotels overcome common challenges

Operations, sales, and revenue teams are implementing business intelligence as they face several challenges today.

Balancing guest experience with operational needs

Time constraints affect all departments. For operations, managers and team leaders often need to step in to support daily tasks, reducing their ability to communicate with commercial teams and adapt operations to shifting demand.

Additionally, many guest-facing departments lack awareness of business intelligence, necessitating further training to fully benefit from a BI-driven approach.

Having a quick, central source-of-truth allows hoteliers in operational roles to quickly review the data most relevant to them, and get back time in their day to focus on creating positive guest experiences.

With a BI solution, a general manager can check their overnight pickup, rate shop, and room type availability reports in one place in just a few minutes, and then get back to running the hotel. Without a BI solution a general manager might spend upwards of an hour downloading, printing, and analyzing multiple reports from different sources.

Gathering enough data for actionable insights

Revenue and sales teams have a limited number of hours in the day for data analysis, so it can be frustrating when that time is lost to manual data collection and collation. As a result, they struggle to gather accurate, relevant, and real-time data independently. This lack of information hampers their ability to make optimal pricing and distribution decisions.

To address these issues, hotels must prioritize implementing business intelligence tools that automate tasks and provide reliable data, especially in volatile markets.

These tools will empower operations, sales, and revenue teams to make informed business decisions, better adapt to market changes, and ultimately, stay competitive in shifting market conditions.

Lighthouse Business Intelligence: The leading BI solution for hotels

Lighthouse Business Intelligence is the hotel industry's leading business intelligence solution, enabling hotel teams to monitor, optimize and report on their hotel's performance.

An overview of Lighthouse Business Intelligence features and capabilities

Portfolio Reporting Capabilities for above-property decision makers

Lighthouse BI makes monitoring an entire portfolio easy, even if it is composed of multiple branded and independent hotels.

Pickup / Pace monitoring / Demand

All departments can watch exactly where pickup is happening (by segment) by utilizing the heatmap feature within BI

Also, other views within BI allow to see pickup side by side with market demand levels, optimal bar recommendations, and other vital information

Sales guidance with account alignment and displacement tools

Lighthouse BI also includes robust tools for sales roles including the displacement calculator, and the accounts module which calculates wish rates, opportunities, and displacement amounts.

How to improve revenue management with Lighthouse Business Intelligence

Lighthouse Business Intelligence allows teams to completely do away with manual report pulling and spreadsheets. Portfolio-level dashboards, and user-friendly data visualization make analysis easier for all departments.

Hotel teams can access their hotel’s historical data and forward-looking data from the highest summary level information such as total revenue, occupancy and Average Daily Rate (ADR) for any given time period across a portfolio of hotels, down to the most granular reservation level for an individual property.

This level of detail gives teams the power to make informed decisions related to forecasting, group pricing, determining VIP guests and companies, corporate account pricing strategies, and so much more.

Integrating Lighthouse Business Intelligence into your existing tech stack

Lighthouse BI integrates seamlessly with any hotel’s tech stack. 

It’s compatible with most Property Management System (PMS), Revenue Management System (RMS), and CRS combinations because the goal is to complement your existing technology, not replace it.

Effortless integration with Lighthouse BI

Data collection from branded or independent property systems typically takes a few hours, with more complex cases taking up to two days. Minimal involvement from your team is required.

Lighthouse BI consolidates data sources and can extract information from multiple PMSs, enabling your team to easily monitor the entire portfolio in a consistent format.

It provides reservation-level insights, allowing for flexible data analysis as needed. 

This helps your team uncover revenue opportunities and keeps everyone informed with a daily snapshot emailed each morning.

Finally, Lighthouse BI also automates the forecast and budget process, saving your team time and providing a solid foundation for budget season.

Stay a step ahead of your competitors with Lighthouse Business Intelligence

As hotel markets continue to get more competitive, and hotel data more complex, quickly adapting to emerging trends and fostering close collaboration between operations and commercial departments is crucial. A unified approach enables teams to work towards common goals and support each other's efforts.

The easiest way to put this into practice is to leverage a powerful and robust business intelligence solution.

By providing real-time insights and promoting communication between revenue and sales teams, Lighthouse Business Intelligence enables the agile strategies necessary to succeed in today's challenging landscape.

If you want to get ahead of your competition and seize more revenue opportunities, reach out now to see how Lighthouse Business Intelligence could benefit your hotel.