How to Raise Investment Capital with Hotel Review Analytics

With online hotel review analytics, you have the opportunity to know virtually anything about any hotel, anywhere, from a guest perspective. Analytics have already helped dozens of our client partners evaluate investments and identify market opportunities.

But what if you’re looking to secure capital for a new project, investment or fund? Let’s take a look at how review analytics might help you.

Showing before/after performance

If you’ve participated in any hotel projects before, past performance indicators are a pillar of your capital raising strategy. Your track record of success – and (hopefully) how you outperform the market, other competitors or investment groups should speak for itself.

Review analytics can help to independently verify the story of how well you have done. Tracking the movement of your hotels’ Global Review Index^TM (GRI) over time and in various contexts can be very insightful.

You can apply this process to brand success as well – illustrating how Brand X performed vs. Brand Y over the past several years in similar markets.

Researchers at Cornell have demonstrated how outperforming competitors in the Global Review Index^TM can not only help you drive superior revenue performance – it can also affect valuation.

Identifying what guests love about top performing hotels

After analyzing your own hotels’ performance, take a look at the market. Review analytics can help you see macro-level market insights from the perspective of real hotel guests at the neighborhood, city, or destination level, including:

• Market supply of existing hotels
• Overall guest satisfaction levels (the GRI)
• What’s hot and what’s not among these hotels
• Review sites and distribution channels popular in that area
• Guest demographics for these hotels

This insight provides a way to identify brand characteristics and operating practices that are succeeding in the market. If you know which concepts are a hit – both according to guest satisfaction and financially – then you can understand more specifically what guests love about it. These findings can be applied to your next project or investment.

Identifying unmet market needs

Building on the point above, a deeper understanding of the market supply right now also means you can understand what is absent in your market – but could succeed.

Which concepts are working well on a national or international level, but have yet to arrive in your city? Whether it is rooftop bars, popup shops, or grab & go food service – city-to-city comparisons can reveal successful concepts that are present in other locations but not in your own market.

Use macro-level guest feedback to validate the opportunity from changes in traveler behavior. Track this over time to separate the fads from the longer-term trends.

Proving the validity of a concept

In summary, this is all about backing up your economic analysis, market research, trend spotting and intuition with guest feedback data. By adding review analytics to your fundraising efforts, you add the confirmation of tens of thousands of your future guests. Your proposed project will be based on the wisdom of the crowd. The investment becomes less of a risk by validating each of your assumptions in advance through the words of other travelers.

“This changes everything. In minutes, I have more business intelligence and competitive benchmarking at my fingertips than I could get in a week with a mystery shopping service.”
– Senior executive of leading hotel investment group in reference to ReviewPro’s review analytics

Have you used review analytics as part of the process of raising capital? Do you see additional opportunities for this in the future? Tell me in the comments below….

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>> Learn more how ReviewPro’s Hotel Analysis Reports are helping hotel investors raise capital >>