European Results January - August 2010....

PLEASE CLICK ON A GRAPH TO ENLARGE.  

The above data is pulled from a consistent sample of hotels from all of our European cities. London, Frankfurt & Moscow are the consistent performers YTD, and the biggest variation comes from Easter in London, and Summer in Stockholm, although August is a particularly poor month all round. Please contact us if you would like some more in depth information about our data, or leave us a comment below. Watch out for more market data coming up in the next few weeks from our other destinations!

£100 million YTD for Conference Revenue? you must be JOKING!

So here at The Conference Bench we have been doing quite a bit of year to date data analysis of late, and we wanted to share some of our results with you, as the data has been pretty staggering:

January 2010 - August 2010 

Total Revenue:

London:                       £40,726, 201 (15 hotels)

Dubai:                   AED 174,754,126 (24 hotels)  (approx £30,444,970)

Abu Dhabi:            AED 103,292,997 (10 hotels) (approx £17,995,296)

Now, bearing in mind these totals are for just a small sample of venues in each of our cities, you begin to wonder how much money is actually out there for companies and private individuals to spend on Conference and Events! I mean the total for these three cities will be well over £100million come the end of September, between 50 hotels, and we have the busiest conference season yet to come, in October, November and December!  I will be very interested to see the year end results for our expanded samples in all of our markets. 

We do come across a few hotel companies that are yet to take their conference figures seriously... surely figures like the above will get them to sit up and take notice of how their space is performing?  Are they grabbing any significant part of this massive multinational business?

As an aside the occupancy for the above markets is as follows:

London:       38.60%

Dubai:          38.91%

Abu Dhabi:  42.53%

These occupancy figures may seem to be fairly low to the eye that is accustomed to reading bedroom occupancies in the 80's and 90 percentage bracket. However the top performing hotels in the Conference Bench average between 50 - 70% occupancy. Just imagine if these markets could eke another 10 - 12 % in occupancy, the difference to the Revenue would be intriguing to say the least.

What do you think?  Are you grabbing your fair share of this massive amount of revenue? 

Does Brand and Star Rating make a difference to Revenue Share?

Typically in our statistics, the % share of the revenue is quite often equal to the % share of the space, which is fairly logical. So if the hotel has 30% of the space in the comp set, it very often captures 30% of the total revenue from the comp set, and the same goes for the market share as well.

However we have seen that the above theory is not applicable to everyone so we decided to do a study on the top performing hotels in each of our destinations, to try and find out what it is that is driving such strong performance. Taking the top performing hotel in 7 of our cities the first thing we noticed very quickly is that they where nearly all branded, and where all 5 star rated. Looking a bit closer we also found that they all share very similar prime locations in their destinations as well. 

Furthermore we can see that capturing more revenue than their fair share of space is a common occurrence for these hotels. In fact they are capturing a lot more than expected. Most of them are achieving 50% more revenue than their share (i.e.: when their Share of the space is at 20%, regularly taking 30% of the market revenue). In fact some even reach 3 times their share in some locations (i.e.: share of 5% of the space taking 15% of the market revenue).

For the 7 hotels we looked at, on average they have 12.58% of the space in their respective markets, and take 20.54% of the revenue!  This is an increase over their fair share of the space of 63% or 7.96 percentage points!

So is this a case of the Brand Beats all?  Well out of the top 7 performing hotels we looked at, it is an independent 5* property that beats them all. How do they do it?  From an outsiders point of view there are seem to be several reasons: the location, loyal customer base of repeat business, the type of rooms, the availability, and the overall strategy. Those factors combined make it especially hard to beat this hotel in its market place, especially as it beats out the closet performing hotel in the rest of the top 7 by 130%!

Can you guess which of our hotels is winning the global battle for The Conference Bench Revenue Share Crown in 2010 YTD?  Comment below!

Article written by Gabriel Felissent.

This Blog: 1. Chain Hotel Website: 0.

A little while back I posted a blog about Hotel chain websites, and how they can be useless when it comes to properly explaining the conference and banqueting aspects of a hotel or property. You can see the blogpost here.

Then last Friday, I received a lovely e-mail from one of  our participating chain hotels. The hotel itself shall remain anonymous, but it is safe to say that the chain head office was questioning their need for an additional website to the poor cookie cutter version that appears on their brand’s site.

To quote directly:

“Of course it goes without saying that I was able to argue that the site had paid for itself inside its lifetime and had generated in excess of £x.xm worth of enquiries in it's first 12 months.  However, even in the face of such weighty empirical evidence it seems to have been your humble blog that has finally beaten them into retreat so for that I'm eternally grateful!”

This is great news for the participating hotel – they get to keep their bespoke website (which is most definitely designed to sell conference, and works very well indeed), and our blog post is vindicated! 

Got any success stories to share from your own website? Or are you wrangling with head office over how best to present your meetings and event offering? Comment below!