Knowing that this interactive platform has many features to offer, we chose to share with you our top 7 favorite ingredients from the BenchDirect recipe for direct booking success. Let’s dive into our secret sauce so you can take a sneak peak at what this one-of-a-kind hotel benchmarking tool has to offer.

Pppst…. Did you know that BenchDirect is free for hotels, forever? Be sure to request your account today and become part of our fast-growing network.

1. A twist to traditional benchmarking 

The first and most important ingredient for our recipe is the entirely new spin on benchmarking that BenchDirect takes. This platform is totally different from traditional hotel benchmarking. Think of it this way. If traditional hotel benchmarking were a photo, BenchDirect would be a video. You don’t just get to see the final result of occupancy and rate comparisons; with BenchDirect, you can see every step along the booking funnel of how that result came to be. With this exciting twist, you get more insights that are much more detailed so you can actually act on them.

2. Our dynamic competitive sets

The next secret ingredient is one of the things that really makes BenchDirect different. BenchDirect offers multiple, dynamic competitive sets. You can compare your hotel’s direct channel performance to 4 dynamic competitive sets:

1. Other properties within your own brand
2. Similar hotels located in the same destination 
3. Our very own THN compset - a selection of the 50 hotels most similar to yours from THN’s global network
4. Custom - create your very own compset to benchmark against 

The compsets available in BenchDirect

Having the ability to compare your hotel to not only the hotels in your area but from around the globe allows you to set the bar high for your brand and lets you learn from the top-performing properties with a similar profile to yours. 

3. The newest addition to RevPAR: RevDirect

Then, we added a dash of something new. Imagine being able to track RevPAR but just for your direct channel. Well now you can! 

RevDirect is a brand new metric measuring direct booking revenue per available room so you can analyze one of the industry’s core KPIs now centered on your direct channel. This metric is a game changer in tracking the evolution of your hotel’s direct booking performance and understanding the changes you need to make.

4. Keeping tabs on price disparities

When creating this recipe, there's one ingredient we knew we couldn’t leave out. For us, being able to benchmark price disparities was a key part of getting the dish just right! 

If you detect that your hotel has more price disparities than your compsets, this is probably affecting your website conversion rate. You can use the analytics to identify the OTAs causing the issue, understand your performance in specific source markets and detect the device where the disparities are showing. This way, you can take the appropriate actions to regain your market share.

5. Seeing into the future

Wouldn’t you love to know about trends and stay ahead of the game? We thought so, and so we dropped in a crystal ball. BenchDirect collects data not only based on bookings, but also on searches, so it can provide you with insights about future demand at your hotel compared to the market.

If you want to know which are the most popular stay dates being searched by visitors to your website, BenchDirect can show you when peaks of demand are happening so you can review your pricing and availability and make sure your campaigns target those dates to encourage more bookings.

6. Visuals to suit everyone’s tastes

Are you more of a charts or tables person? We added a little pinch of creativity and flexibility so that within each BenchDirect section, you can choose the way you want to view the data. In the “chart” display, you’ll see a series of graphics including Bar Charts, Boxplots, Timelines and even the distribution by Stay dates. You also have the option to download the entire page or just a specific chart or table in a PDF or CSV format.

A box plot graph is our personal favorite. Its handy design visually shows how the data values are spread out, providing you with more details about the range and distribution of data in 4 different quartiles. By looking at the colored bars in the box plot, you can see clearly where your property sits compared to the distribution of the hotels within the compsets. 

A BenchDirect box plot graph

7. Be in the know with Revenue per visitor 

Last but not least, we felt an extra hint of revenue insights was key. Did you know you can filter BenchDirect data to better understand Revenue per visitor for different segments? 

Based on these insights, you can optimize your offers by only displaying discounts to those markets or devices that really need an extra incentive to book, helping to save on marketing spend and increase net revenue. Being able to drill down to this level of detail will help you make better decisions at a granular that strengthen your direct channel strategy.

Craving to know more about our secret sauce and recipe for direct booking success? Good news, we're ready to spill the beans... Find out everything you need to know or sign up now to join our global network of hotels using BenchDirect. We can’t wait to see you start supercharging your direct channel strategy!