A Case Study for case CEOs, Heads of Sales, CMOs,
Hyatt Continued Market Share Dominance With 24 Months Of Consecutive RevPAR Growth
The situation: your brand is your competition.
Hyatt added two brands: Hyatt Place and HYATT House. After over a year of consecutive RevPAR growth they needed to find how to compete in the marketplace, but moreover against their own success. They were also evolving into being a franchise-centric hotel organization. Many of their competitors in the space support their franchisees through touches, or support. What Hyatt was doing got them a long way, but they needed a leap to the next growth phase.How could they grow, scale, and still customize to create bankable impact?
Growing is good right? How many hours in a day?
The Hyatt Place brand was growing and quickly moving to doubling in size. The sales leaders were stretched with the number of hotels, owners, and revenue within their region. They were frustrated on how to create impact needed with the owners, having less time with each of them. There were too many for them to rank and work through. Approaching the situation like their competitors wouldn’t work, particularly if they were judging by performance on impact.
All are not created equally.
Being born out of a smaller estate, Hyatt Place approached all of the hotels with the same leadership strategy though there were hundreds of different markets with seasonal differences and myriads of customers. Paradoxically that meant they were essentially managing 150 different strategies. This added to the fire of how to simplify to create impact. Hyatt House joined the division adding more fuel to the burning platform.
Everyone is here, but who should start?
The sales teams weren’t the only ones working with the Hyatt Place and HYATT House hotels and owners. Revenue management and marketing were also approaching the hotels with the same mindset, ‘How do we get to all the hotels and make everyone happy?” Everyone worked hard to create value, but impact was secondary.
Strategy / Approach:
Hyatt needed to move away from the prescribed cadence of the calendar and create a more scalable approach based upon segmenting the assets and then building the necessary strategy.
Segmenting and Characterizing.
It was important to look at how to segment the hotels. Which were losing market share? Which were loosing wallet share? Which were in double jeopardy of both. The second level of customization broke the hotels further into market demographics. In this case it was urban, suburban, destination, and airport.
Analysis and Discovery.
In each of the now eight categories, e.g. suburban hotels looking to increase rate, the revenue tri-fecta (sales, revenue management, and marketing) looked at each segment of customer within the hotel. Discussions focused on what is the percentage of revenue/mix benchmark, what is the average rate, and what are the buying tendencies of the customer?
Building a synchronized strategy.
Strategies with the key areas of sales, revenue management, and marketing were added for each customer segment. These strategies described how to inspire each customer, in each hotel type, in every revenue situation.
That enabled teams to communicate what is needed to grow the hotel, and who should be involved for the quickest return and to create the most impact for the investors. Bottom line: we helped Hyatt make it easier for teams to manage energy expenditure for the largest return.
The Outcome:
Hyatt Place and Hyatt House had over 110% RevPAR growth for over two years in both rate and occupancy.
Through our work they had:
- Created segmentation by demographic and revenue demands to understand the best path to optimizing revenue.
- Created bench marking for best of class revenue generation.
- Designed supporting sales strategies, revenue management practices, and marketing tactics specific to individual hotels.
- Executed strategic implementation of the right solutions, to the right customers.
- Energized to create impact, decrease costs, and with no changes in headcount in a growth environment.