Customer Success Story - Minor Hotels

About Minor Hotels

Minor Hotels is an international hotel owner, operator and investor, currently with a portfolio of over 530 properties. Through their Anantara, Avani, Elewana, Oaks, NH Hotels, NH Collection, nhow and TIVOLI properties, Minor Hotels operates in 53 countries across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Europe and South America.

A diverse portfolio

Minor owns and manages a diverse portfolio located in a wide range of global markets. We have resorts and city-center properties. Some of our properties are highly seasonal.

OTA Insight came to our attention initially when reviewing the Rate Insight tool because we needed an alternative to our existing rate shopping and parity vendor. We were searching for a better solution that met the needs of our commercial and operational leadership up and down the organization. While piloting Rate Insight, we then became aware of Revenue Insight.

Challenges and new opportunities

Property management systems are meant to deliver operational efficiency success to properties and process transactions; they aren’t necessarily built to be dynamic reporting systems and business intelligence tools. Our existing business intelligence tool supported by our hard-working analytics team was only accessible by a smaller user group, primarily our revenue leaders. During our weekly property strategy meetings and our quarterly reviews, time is money. Often the window of opportunity to make a decision or answer a critical question is very short. Revenue Insight has enabled us to be more nimble and seize commercial opportunities as they are identified.

Furthermore, with Revenue Insight our teams can substantiate their decision as they now have the granular data to back it up. In the past, often assumptions or rules-of-thumb would be applied that could result in suboptimal decisions being made. Today, Revenue Insight is being used as a dynamic tool in our strategy meetings to help support strategies and to understand the associated opportunities and risks with each decision. In our quarterly reviews, senior leadership can ask probing questions of specific properties. OTA Insight has in cases better equipped those properties to provide a detailed answer in response.

“A crucial benefit of Revenue Insight is that business intelligence that was once the exclusive domain of revenue leaders and other analysts is now available to all.”

Accessible to all

You don't have to be a tech guru to use Revenue Insight; the presentation and usability are straightforward and accessible to anyone that knows how to use a web application. Revenue Insight has put the power of our data in the hands of a much wider group at Minor - I often say Revenue Insight has democratized our data. A few GMs have even admitted to me that they open Revenue Insight before they log into email in the morning!

A crucial benefit of Revenue Insight is that business intelligence that was once the exclusive domain of revenue leaders and other analysts is now available to all. The value delivered by our commercial teams is directly linked to being on the same page - literally and figuratively. To that end, Revenue Insight takes a lot of information that may be otherwise difficult to analyze, and it puts it in one place in a format that is easily digestible and understandable.

One of our goals using the tool was that we wanted wide application training in order to broaden the commercial knowledge of many throughout the organisation and allow them to be able to become more self-service, which is great for efficiency.

OTA Insight has been a great partner in offering regular training sessions, mini-training sessions or training sessions for new hires. We’ve been able to upskill some of our colleagues on understanding market trends and monitoring what's happening at the property as opposed to depending on others to teach them.

When we started out with Revenue Insight, we weren't entirely sure what the impact would be in terms of giving other departments exposure to the tool, but the result has been tremendous and a real success story in terms of efficiencies and accessibility.

An eagle-eye view

What has really been game-changing for us at Minor is the quick ability to be able to filter, pivot and drill through the data at different levels. We have an outstanding revenue management solution, IDeaS, which we combine with Revenue Insight as mission-critical decision support for our commercial teams.

A highlight for many of our team members is being able to look and quickly highlight a period of year-on-year change. This means they can see days that are up and down, and quickly alert the team to opportunities or risks based on year-on-year pace. We then have the ability to research further to quickly explain if perhaps the variance is due to a non-recurring group, special event, or other shifts that might require recalibrating our strategy.

“Revenue Insight has enabled us to be more nimble and seize commercial opportunities.”

Deeper data

Revenue Insight enables us to dive much deeper into the insight of our hotels’ performance. Previously, we might have to await weekly, biweekly or monthly reporting before we could properly gauge our hotels’ past performance and future outlook. Even then, those reports might be at an aggregated level which would give us part, but not all of the answers. Now we have everything being put together in one dashboard on a nightly basis for Revenue, Sales, E-Commerce, and Operational leadership. It’s a huge leap forward instead of looking at what was often a disparate set of reports and data, not all of which agreed.

A final word to the industry

Revenue Insight is a mission-critical solution for Revenue Management and hoteliers in general. It’s a flexible and easily accessible tool for a wide group of users. It empowers users with analysis and with data that may not have been accessible previously, and with that comes an improvement in commercial knowledge and becoming upskilled in their own analysis of their responsibilities. Revenue Insight is an invaluable tool for the industry to have at their fingertips on a daily basis.