How Herdwick Cottages Removed The Guesswork With Direct Data

With a competitive short-term rental market, Herdwick Cottages felt the increasing need to understand their performance relative to competitors. They aimed to utilize direct data in order to gain a true view of the market for their U.K. based cottages and make strategic decisions to boost revenue.

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“We needed something that could provide actual data for us to monitor the markets that we work in and ultimately see how our performance matches against the market averages and our competitors.”
‍- Adam Stephenson

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Challenges

Herdwick Cottages previously faced several challenges in utilizing scraped data alone to inform their business decisions, including:

• Inaccurate metrics reporting for KPIs such as Occupancy and Average Daily Rate
• An inability to develop competitive comparisons to understand how their properties compared to competitive properties in their market
• The ongoing need for historical data for a broader look at performance
• A lack of insight into the performance of their own portfolio without manually exporting and manipulating data from their PMS

Amid a post-COVID rebound in tourism, Hardwick Cottages needed good data and good decisions to grow bookings in their competitive market. They’d tried other rental data sources in the past. However inaccurate information resulted in skewed performance metrics, sub-optimal pricing, and lost revenue.

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Solution

To gain the most comprehensive view of performance and the ability to make better strategic business decisions, Herdwick Cottages implemented Key Data as a direct integration with their PMS, with a focus on: 

• Gaining a holistic view of their property portfolio with drill-down options to compare individual units to their portfolio as well as competitors 
• Improving homeowner communication to increase satisfaction and retention
• Visually setting and reviewing their targets for team goals against historical data with the comprehensive Budgeting tool
• Understanding what locations, booking platforms, and website pages their visitors are searching and booking from with Key Data’s DemandIQ tool

Herdwick Cottages implemented Key Data to gain a source of direct data pulled straight from their property management system. Within their dashboard, they focused on three key areas. They prioritized tracking their individual property performance for marketing objectives with their leaderboard, conducting quarterly review calls with owners based on homeowner reports, and benchmarking their performance. With reliable performance tracking in these key areas, they utilized a data-driven approach to focus on growing their revenue.

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Results

Herdwick Cottages was able to quickly recognize areas for improvement and make adjustments to maximize return for their business. They dove into the data to spot performance differences between physical locations and property types. With these new insights, Herdwick Cottages removed the guesswork out of strategic decision-making by learning what guests were searching for and how their properties performed compared to local competitors. 

Additionally, they streamlined communication with homeowners to build trust with regular, detailed reporting that explains market conditions and performance to homeowners. This initiative has led to a smoother process for both communication and decision making as well as boosted revenue. 

“It’s actually helped us increase our revenue…We found that in some areas our ADR is actually less than the market average. So, we were able to increase our ADR while still getting the bookings and it meant that we got that extra revenue.” - Adam Stephenson

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