BOOKING PACE: A LOVE AFFAIR THAT CAN BE MISLEADING

Hoteliers have a decades old love affair with Pace Analysis. Stop the madness! You might be misleading yourselves with potentially harmful commercial consequences. That’s an unassailable truism more so in today’s “new normal” than any other time in the past. To make it worse, hoteliers have looked at Pace Analysis in a single dimension through a single lens without much granularity. Can’t blame those that do not have access to HotelIQ, which is where our proprietary lagging and leading metrics reveal insights that cannot be found elsewhere. Manual analytics done using Excel are very limited and are no longer sufficient to compete in today’s data-driven environment.

Pace analysis is a snapshot in time. It does not tell anything about where it’s been or where it’s going. Pace is up, everyone feels great. Pace is down, everyone panics and starts opening the floodgates, lowering prices and succumbs to a costly marketing frenzy without realizing the trend of Pace (change in future business activity) is a much more crucial metric to monitor then just Pace analysis. We call that Pace Progression, a proprietary metric/analysis we have developed in HotelIQ. Pace Progression measures the speed of change of future business activity versus a comparison date range. No one should feel great when Pace is up for a certain timeframe in the future if the trend is sloping downward. Conversely, no one should panic and start opening the floodgates, lowering prices and succumbing to panic discounting like ‘stay two nights, get one night free’ when Pace is down for a certain timeframe in the future but its trend is sloping upward. See below, a Pace Progression visual from HotelIQ.

Measuring booking Pace is worthless in isolation. Pace Progression contextualizes it by measuring and monitoring the speed of change of future business activity versus a comparison date range. So, hoteliers, stop the decades old love affair with Pace analysis and start benefiting from the liberating power of Pace Progression metric.