Comp Sets Decoded: The Key to Smarter Hotel Benchmarking

In the dynamic world of hospitality, where every decision influences the bottom line, comp sets—or competitor sets—play a pivotal role in benchmarking and profit intelligence. The right comp set doesn’t just offer data; it delivers context, enabling hotel operators to make informed decisions that optimize operations and boost profitability.

Why Comp Sets Matter

At its core, a comp set is a curated group of hotels considered direct competitors to your property. The value of benchmarking hinges on selecting the right properties for comparison. A well-defined comp set:

• Reveals actionable insights: Pinpoints areas where your hotel excels or lags behind.
• Enhances strategic decisions: Provides clarity on pricing, cost management, and resource allocation.
• Boosts profitability: Uncovers opportunities to optimize revenue and reduce expenses.

Without the right comp set, data can mislead rather than guide. For instance, comparing a boutique property to a luxury resort in a different market segment would yield skewed insights, hindering strategic growth.

The Dimensions of an Effective Comp Set

Building a comp set involves balancing two critical dimensions: similarity and competition. These dimensions ensure that comparisons are both relevant and meaningful.

Similarity: Finding Comparable Hotels

The foundation of any comp set is similarity. Hotels in the same comp set should share key characteristics, such as:

• Capacity: Number of rooms and meeting spaces.
• Offerings: F&B options, amenities, and facilities.
• Location: Geographic proximity and market segment.
• Type and class: Star rating, pricing strategy, and operational focus.

For example, if your hotel features a renowned spa, including properties with similar wellness offerings provides actionable insights. When perfect matches aren’t available, flexibility is crucial—consider secondary sets for specialized attributes like banquet revenues or F&B performance.

Competition: Seeing Through the Guest’s Perspective

Similarity defines operational traits, but competition captures market dynamics. Competition is fluid, influenced by:

• Seasonality: A beachfront resort might compete with similar properties in summer but shift focus to urban hotels during the off-season.
• Guest segmentation: Properties targeting business travelers compete differently than those attracting leisure guests.

For example, during a city’s conference season, your hotel might compete with larger business-oriented properties. Off-season, you might focus on boutique competitors catering to transient leisure travelers.

Internal vs. External Comp Sets

A robust benchmarking strategy often involves both internal and external comp sets:

1. Internal Comp Sets: Compare properties within your portfolio. For instance, analyzing payroll costs across your brand’s hotels can uncover best practices to share organization-wide.
2. External Comp Sets: Benchmark against properties outside your ownership. This approach provides insight into market positioning and highlights competitive advantages or deficiencies.

Best Practices for Comp Set Formation

Creating an effective comp set isn’t a one-time task. Market conditions, renovations, and rebranding efforts continuously reshape the competitive landscape. Regular reassessment ensures relevance and accuracy. HotStats’ can simplify this process by providing tailored support for defining and maintaining comp sets.

Key guidelines for forming external comp sets with HotStats include:

• Sufficiency: Include at least four properties (excluding your own).
• Anonymity: Represent at least three distinct operators, owners, or brands.
• Balance: Ensure no single operator exceeds 50% of the sample (excluding your rooms).

Operational Benchmarking Shedding Light on Efficiency Gains

Operational benchmarking provides valuable insights for hoteliers by enabling a granular comparison of key performance indicators (KPIs) across properties. Beyond traditional metrics like RevPAR and occupancy, advanced benchmarking focuses on departmental performance, profitability, and cost controls, offering a clearer picture of operational efficiency.

One Size Does Not Fit All: Customizing Comp Sets for Operational Departments

While a single comp set can provide valuable high-level benchmarking, it’s important to recognize that operational departments within a hotel often have distinct needs and priorities. A one-size-fits-all comp set may overlook these nuances, limiting its utility for specific departmental benchmarking.

Hotels can—and should—select different comp sets tailored to individual operational areas. For example:

Food & Beverage (F&B): When analyzing F&B performance, a hotel might choose competitors with similar restaurant concepts, banquet facilities, or menu pricing strategies, in totally different geographic locations and regardless of broader market differences.

Spa and Wellness: For properties with a spa, the comp set might focus on facilities that attract a similar wellness clientele, even if these competitors vary in other areas such as location or guest segmentation.

Conference and Banqueting: For properties targeting corporate events, comparing venues with comparable meeting space capacities and AV amenities is critical.

Rooms Division: Metrics like labor costs and utilities may warrant comparison against properties with similar room layouts, HVAC systems, or operational footprints.

Tailoring comp sets to these departmental needs allows hoteliers to extract more granular insights. For example, a hotel may outperform its overall comp set in GOPPAR but underperform in F&B profitability. By creating a specialized comp set, the hotel can identify more precise areas for improvement and strategize effectively.

The flexibility to define multiple comp sets ensures that every department benefits from relevant benchmarking. HotStats make it easier to manage these tailored sets, enabling operators to focus on actionable intelligence rather than manual data manipulation.

With this tailored approach, hotels can uncover more meaningful insights, such as the following examples of how operational benchmarking reveals efficiency gains.

For example, comparing food and beverage costs as a percentage of revenue across similar properties can reveal opportunities for cost optimization. Identifying these insights helps hotel operators take actionable steps toward improved profitability.

HotStats’ platform supports these benchmarking efforts by providing detailed operational data, enabling hotels to drill down into their performance metrics and uncover trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. For example:

• Departmental Costs: Compare labor or utility expenses to uncover inefficiencies.
• Revenue Streams: Benchmark ancillary revenues like parking or spa services against peers.
• Profit Margins: Align operational strategies with industry leaders by analyzing GOPPAR, TrevPAR and other KPIs.

Consider this scenario: A boutique hotel’s utility costs are 25% higher than its comp set average. By benchmarking with HotStats, the hotel identifies outdated HVAC systems as the culprit. Upgrading to energy-efficient solutions not only reduces costs but also aligns with sustainability goals.

Empowering Hotels with Profit Intelligence

Comp sets are the cornerstone of effective benchmarking, offering the context needed to turn data into decisions. By carefully defining and maintaining these sets, hoteliers unlock opportunities to refine operations, enhance guest satisfaction, and drive profitability.

With operational benchmarking tools, you’re not just comparing—you’re leading. Empower your hotel with profit intelligence and redefine what success looks like in hospitality.
Discover more on our website and take the first step toward smarter benchmarking today.