LONDON — Magnuson Hotels, a global hotel chain, and STR, provider of data benchmarking, analytics, and marketplace insights for hospitality sectors, today announced the integration of an automated global data exchange that allows hoteliers to receive daily local-market benchmarking.
The data exchange is the first integration of its kind. On a nightly basis, each Magnuson Hotel affiliate’s performance data is uploaded to STR, while STR sends back to Magnuson benchmarking for each hotel across all local and global markets.
This allows Magnuson to guide each hotel on the most effective pricing strategy and determine the most profitable untapped local business segments.
“We are pleased to partner with Magnuson Hotels on advancing our benchmarking partnership to a daily frequency,” said Robin Rossmann, STR’s managing director. “Whilst the framework for this integration was developed in the pre-pandemic world, the fruition could not be timelier given the increased urgency for the performance insights that will help hoteliers capitalize on return demand. As we continue to develop our offerings with historical and forward-looking solutions, this integration can serve as a template for additional companies around the globe.”
“Hotels will no longer have to hope they can do a few percent better than last year,” said Thomas Magnuson, CEO of Magnuson Hotels. “With the complete STR data integration, Magnuson can help each hotel determine its maximum possible market performance, and thus build precise pricing and distribution plans to achieve specific revenue targets. The data exchange will also help hotel owners reduce the rising customer acquisition costs of OTAs by expanding each hotel’s sources of direct local business.”
Magnuson’s four fundamentals for revenue planning are data building, benchmarking, forecasting, and automation. Without complete local market data on performance, pricing, volume, and business segments, hotels cannot enact profitable business strategies, according to the company.
For example, a hotel that has been branded as an economy hotel may have recently renovated, and thus achieved higher online customer reviews. However, because the hotel has not properly benchmarked its Star rating, online reviews, and amenities against the competition, it is selling too low. As hotels run low rates to drive high occupancy, the increased operating costs end up outweighing any revenue increase and eroding any profits.
The STR/Magnuson data exchange allows hoteliers to transition from a lower-margin occupancy strategy to a 365-day RevPAR strategy, as measured by the optimum revenue per available room night. Magnuson added, “Since the STR integration last January, the benchmarking data has helped guide Magnuson Hotels to a chainwide RevPAR (revenue per available room) surpassing the U.S. average by two to one.”
