If you are a vacation rental owner or manager, you know that planning your booking strategy for the next year is a constant balancing act.
On the one hand, you want to be able to take advantage of last-minute deals and spontaneous travelers. On the other hand, you don't want to overbook and end up with empty rooms.
Luckily, there is a platform that can help you with this balancing act. Key Data has a suite of intelligent data-driven dashboards that use powerful search-engine technology to predict future trends in the travel industry.
This means Key Data can help you easily plan your 2023 booking strategy. This also means no more stressful researching and countless hours spent analyzing data.
So how exactly does Key Data solve your 2023 strategic planning goals?
Let's look at three key components of any forward-looking strategy to discover how Key Data's software supports each.
.png)
Setting Revenue Goals
Revenue goals help by providing an overall picture of what you plan to achieve for the year. By formalizing these goals into an actionable plan, stakeholders at every level of your business can see the vision of growth you have in mind.
Setting revenue goals will help you:
· Set Expectations: Clear expectations motivate your team to perform and provide a more strategic approach to how you manage your business.
· Make Informed Decisions: You cannot succeed in a vacuum. Goals help you use real data to provide actionable insights.
· Track Profits/Losses: Goals allow you to monitor the key driver of your success—the money.
· Quantify Growth: How can you determine whether you are growing unless you quantify what growth is for your business?
Setting Your Rates
When delving into the rate-setting process for 2023, you must consider the individual properties and the company. And if you are one of the 70% that operate as a small business, you don't have time to manually determine the most competitive rates.
You may be very successful at one part of the business, but lack the expertise to maximize your profits. This is where Key Data picks up the baton. With Key Data's budgeting tool, we walk you through setting up your revenue goals. Our system guides you quickly and painlessly through all the key performance indicators you need to be tracking, including historically-adjusted paid occupancy, average daily rate, and revenue.
Understanding these metrics is critical in ensuring peak performance for your business, and close attention to trends and corresponding data between these three factors will help you increase profits.
Occupancy
The occupancy rate gives you one part of the whole picture, but it can be a valuable metric if used correctly. At first glance, a high occupancy rate would seem like a good trend, but if they are too high, it could mean your rates are too low, and you could be leaving money on the table.
Additionally, too high of an occupancy rate can subject your units to damaging wear and tear if there is not enough time to provide maintenance. And one bad review due to problems of this nature could destroy revenues for an entire season.
Our budgeting tool considers hundreds of occupancy data points and combines them with current trends for more accurate insights.
Average Daily Rate
If Occupancy is a measure of rooms sold, ADR is the measure of how much they sold for. You would surmise that higher ADR automatically equals better revenue because the unit nights are sold at a higher rate. However, if that ADR soars too high, you will sacrifice your occupancy rate.
Again, finding the sweet spot with either of these metrics is a difficult task. That’s why at Key Data, we also encourage a focus on Adjusted Revenue Per Available Rental Night or RevPAR.
And with Key Data's budgeting tool, you no longer must spend hours searching for this information, everything you need is available in an instant, right at your fingertips.
Revenue
Revenue optimization is one of the trickier metrics because of the sheer amount of information that goes into its discovery. When should you raise your prices? When should they be lowered? Key Data's budgeting tool eliminates the confusion. Our robust budgeting dashboard analyzes hundreds of pieces of data to ensure your pricing outperforms your competitors and leaves less money on the table.
The budget tool from Key Data saves you time and money by giving you a powerful way to plan and monitor your business revenue goals. Planning revenue based on performance trends helps you better understand what to expect in the coming year.
Creating Custom Comp Sets
As summer winds down and the world returns to its normal routine, vacation rental managers' work has just begun. Now is a vacation rental manager's time to begin putting together comp sets for the coming year.
If you haven't seen Key Data's Custom Comp Set tool, it's time to set up a demo. This tool is a must-have for savvy owners and managers that want a competitive edge in 2023.
Why Use Comp Sets?
Setting up competitive profiles in the vacation rental industry is critical to your business strategy for the coming year. It sets you up to not only understand your competition but also to develop strategies for surpassing them.
Hotels are notorious for obsessing over their competition and often spend considerable cash to make sure they remain competitive with others in the same category. But their access to data teams and financial leverage makes it a difficult model to emulate on a smaller scale.
Common parameters to consider when setting up your own comp sets include:
· Amenities
· Size & Guest Capacity
· Distance & Location
· Performance Metrics
· Experience
· Property Quality
But, with traditional methods of setting up comp sets, you're given a huge amount of data that may not even relate to your specific properties. It's time to cut out the noise and zero in on true, comparable market data.
How Does Data Key Help with Comp Sets?
Fortunately, you now have tools to help you capture exactly what you need, in an instant. With Data Key's Custom Comp Sets, you can customize your competitive rental sets by property. If you want precise data on how your properties are performing against other units that are exclusively matched to your category, our Custom Comp Sets can get you there.
Then, save your selection so you can refer to it later and adjust your strategies as needed. See how you measure up against your real competitors and gain better insights for better 2023 strategic planning.
Planning Marketing Campaigns
As a savvy vacation rental manager, you know that your marketing efforts must be strategic and always evolving. And that's without considering that in the last few years, booking windows have proven more than volatile.
Being able to anticipate price adjustments based on expected booking windows is a valuable way to stay ahead of the curve, but this, again, is on a case-by-case basis. Your larger properties may have longer booking windows since it takes more planning for guests to visit these. Conversely, you will find shorter booking windows in the smaller properties.
It can prove extremely difficult to plan for 2023 with this many changing variables. And when you begin to account for differences in markets, time-frames, and property types, it can all get a
little overwhelming. When your 2023 plan involves so much information, it is vital to use the appropriate tools.
Using Key Data's Pacing Detail Report
Once again, Key Data can provide the insights you need to plan ahead, even for specific dates. By using Key Data's Pacing Detail Report, you can effectively analyze and gain insights from your 2022 occupancy and booking window data.
Look for trends by segment to evaluate guest booking behavior and its effect on occupancy. Use this with the booking curve report to uncover insights into the timing of bookings based on a specific date, month, or even season. The days of “set it and forget it” are gone. You must be nimble and know how to change tactics on the fly, to stay ahead of the competition. The most important thing to remember is to always be ready to adapt as the market changes.
Takeaways
Whether you are setting revenue goals, creating comp sets, or planning your marketing, Key Data provides you with the tools you need to stay competitive.
Don’t waste another year spinning your wheels, trying to strategize with outdated tools and vague data. Let us help you plan your 2023 booking strategy with intelligent dashboards that provide real-time, accurate data you can count on.
We lead the industry in providing data-driven solutions to vacation rental businesses just like yours, and our direct integrations with reservation systems provide the real-time actionable insights you need to remain competitive. If you haven’t heard of our powerful dashboard solutions, it’s time we got you up to speed. Give us a call or request a demo on our website, and let’s help you break through the competition in 2023.