Frequently Asked Questions

Hotel Benchmark allows you to compare your hotel data with aggregated data from other benchmark users sharing theirs, providing valuable context and helping your team to set meaningful targets and gain competitive landscape analysis. Hotels that sign up to Hotel Benchmark provide 'read-only' access to Google Analytics. Based on the information submitted during sign-up your property is assigned to a pre-defined data set and your Google Analytics data is aggregated to create valuable reporting and help you discover how your performance compares to other similar hotels.

Signing up is easy. You can get started by sharing some information about your hotel and using our easy platform to provide ‘read only’ access for your Google Analytics account. Once our team has verified your account, you will be able to view reports in your own dashboard. If you are signing up more than 4 hotels please reach out to our team we can help you with group sign-ups.

Our Hotel Benchmark is currently used by independent and chain hotels in more than 60 countries and this number is growing all the time. As we add hotels we can create more and more regional and city reports. One of our team can help you check whether we are providing reports for your destination.

This is the data set that most closely matches that of your own property based on the information you provided at sign-up; iocation, star rating and facilities. As our community grows and the number of new hotels signing up changes, your assigned set may change if a better fitting set becomes available. If you would prefer a fixed data set upgrading to our Premium Report allows you to create your own customised competitive set, which you can add to or change once every 30 days.

We use a median value to provide the 'average' for the set. Using a median instead of a mean average means that the average is less susceptible to outliers.

Every pre-defined set consists of a minimum number of six hotels to ensure that individual property data is not displayed. You can see a sample of the hotels in your pre-defined set at the end of your Basic Report. To see the full list of your competitors in your hotel database, please upgrade to our Premium Report.

This is a group of hotels that you select for the purpose of benchmarking your performance against theirs in the Premium Report. It does not change over time, unless you update it or if any of your selected hotels leave Hotel Benchmark. You are able to edit your customised set every 30 days. You need to select a minimum of six hotels from more than 3 groups (or independent properties) and none of these groups should represent more than 50% of your data set.

In order to create a customised list of hotels to compare your property(s) against, first you will need to be subscribed to the premium service. Once you have signed in to your Hotel Benchmark account, double click on the middle button at the top of the page labelled 'competitor lists'. This will take you to a page labelled Competitors where you will see an orange coloured button alongside your hotel which is labelled 'edit competitors'. If you double click on this button you will then move to a screen labelled 'Edit Competitor Set'. Here you can use a number of filters to select hotels from our entire community to benchmark your hotel against:

• Country

• City

• Type of hotel (urban or rural)

• Star rating

• Number of rooms

Using the filters will help you to narrow your search and display a list of hotels which meet your chosen criteria. You can then highlight hotels one at a time working through pages where multiple hotels are available. Once you have selected the hotels you would like to compare your property against (they will be highlighted in blue), double click on the orange 'save set' button in the bottom right hand corner. You can then return to your dashboard and select the period for which you would like to generate your report using the competitor set selected. You can edit your competitor list every 30 days.

Yes of course, and we also offer a discounted price for more than one hotel from any group for our Premium Report. If you want to sign up more than 4 properties, contact our team and we can help you with the process. E-Mail: hello@hotelbenchmarking.com

Our Basic report is free for hotels that would like to join our growing community and share their data (anonymously). In exchange we provide a free Basic report. If you would like a report with more detailed metrics or the facility to benchmark against a defined competitor set (the Basic report is an industry average) you can upgrade very easily to our Premium report.

Your Google Analytics (GA4) data is aggregated with the rest of our hotel database to produce reports for Hotel Benchmark users. Other users do not have access to individual hotel data, they can only see your data as part of our aggregated reports. Please refer to our Terms of Use.

If multiple members of your team require access to the data or reports in your Hotel Benchmark dashboard, simply invite them to your organisation. Sign-in to your account and open your Profile at the top of the page. In the panel called Organizations, click on the name of your organization and use the Invite New Members panel to send email invitations to your colleagues. Once the new member verifies their details they will be granted access.

You may be using the wrong e-mail address to connect Google Analytics or the wrong property ID. Our team can provide a solution to get you on board as quickly as possible. We have Google Analytics specialists to help. Please use the contact form at the bottom of the page or e-mail: hello@hotelbenchmarking.com

The Premium Report provides more detailed metrics on your website performance (including device category & channel breakdown) as well as historical data for the previous 24 months. You can select a customised competitor set as well as receive data for a pre-defined data set. Any updates and new functions are automatically passed on to Premium members. Our pricing page illustrates the benefits of the Premium report at a glance. 

First you will need to add your property to Hotel Benchmark and create a user account. Just click on one of the Join Now buttons on the home-page and follow the on-page instructions for signing-up. Once you have added your hotel/signed up for a Basic Report you can upgrade at anytime for our Premium Report and begin enjoying all the benefits. Just contact our team on e-mail: hello@hotelbenchmarking.com

Yes, before you upgrade from our Basic to Premium report you are able to view a full list of properties subscribing to Hotel Benchmark.

Your Premium Report subscription renews on a monthly basis. If you do not wish to continue with your Premium subscription, you are free to cancel at any time and still enjoy the free Basic Report. When you cancel your Premium subscription, it will remain active until the end of your billing period but you will not be charged again after that. If you subscribe with an annual plan (discount applicable) your plan will run till the end of the billing period and no refund will apply.

An average website conversion rate for the hotel industry is between 1.7% and 2%. This figure is based on the reservations made relative to the total number of sessions to your website. Even in the best-case scenarios, where a hotel might be seeing a 5% conversion rate, 95% of visitors are still abandoning. Remember to explore the regular articles we publish on our blog which answer this and more industry-related questions.

We would be sorry to see you leave, but yes, you can delete your Hotel Benchmark account at any time. You can also remove individual hotels, but please note that you cannot remove hotels that are upgraded to Premium Reports until your subscription expires. By deleting your account, you will forfeit any remaining time on your active Premium subscription.

Yes of course we can - competitive benchmark analysis is what our team do best! Just get in touch and they can help you understand what the data is highlighting in your reports, identify trends and provide solutions. E-Mail: hello@hotelbenchmarking.com

We have a team of Google Analytic specialists here to help. Please contact our team and we can take a look at what may need fixing to make sure we can get you on board as quickly as possible. E-mail: hello@hotelbenchmarking.com

We use Speed Index from WebPageTest which calculates the average time at which visible parts of a website page are displayed. It is expressed in milliseconds and dependent on size of the view port. It is particularly useful for comparing experiences of pages against each other (before/after optimising, your site vs competitor, etc) and should be used in combination with the other metrics (load time, start render, etc) to better understand your hotel website's performance.

Engagement rate has replaced bounce rate in GA4 and helps you to measure and analyse user engagement with your website. An engaged session is a session that lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or has at least 2 pageviews or screenviews. The engagement rate is the percentage of engaged sessions on your website.

Bounce rate was the opposite of engagement rate. Bounce rate was the percentage of sessions that were not engaged.

ROI is one of the best ways of determining if your Google Ad campaigns are working. ROI is based on Google Analytics ‘last click’ attribution model. This figure will be higher if reporting via Google Ads directly. Wait until your analytics has had time to accumulate trends before formulating judgements about your campaigns and making changes.

First try and build a picture about your traffic. Is it a sudden decline or is it a trend you have noticed over time? Using the historic traffic index in our Premium Reports makes it easy to identify trends. Secondly try to understand where you are losing traffic by looking at your traffic sources. Use the Hotel Benchmark reports to understand if this is a trend unique to your hotel before trying to pinpoint other reasons for the drop in traffic. Hotel Benchmark makes competitor analysis easier with the Premium Report. It allows you to select hotels to compare your performance against.

When you sign-up/register for Hotel Benchmark we ask you to agree to our Terms & Conditions which is a legally binding contract between Hotel Benchmark and your hotel(s). In providing information to us, you acknowledge and agree that your hotel’s name and location will be displayed to other users of our services, but the confidentiality of your raw data will be maintained.

No, but our Basic Report is free for hotels that sign up, so why wouldn't you? You can remove your hotel from the benchmark at anytime.

If you can’t find the answer to your questions in our useful FAQ section, you can get a faster response using our contact form. If you would prefer to speak to one of our team just chat to us online - we will be happy to help, whether it’s a technical query or you want to find out more about Hotel Benchmark and signing up your hotel(s). Alternatively you can reach us at hello@hotelbenchmarking.com