First, a Word on Historical Data
Let's be clear: historical data isn't useless, but its role has been dangerously misunderstood.
Historical data is for autopsies, not for steering.
Use your past performance to learn, not to navigate. Ask: Why did that promotion fail? Why did that corporate segment underperform? What market conditions led to that holiday surge?
This review provides critical context. It tells you the "why" behind the "what."
But here is the critical pivot: once you have those learnings, you must turn your view 180 degrees—from the past to the future.
Your actual historical data can tell you what your guests did. They cannot tell you what they are about to do. They can't tell you about new behavioral patterns, emerging market segments, or shifting economic drivers. And most importantly, they can't tell you about demand that doesn't even know you exist yet.
That's why the first and most important question you must ask is not about what happened, but what is about to happen outside your own walls.
1. What are the future travel reasons to our destination?
Instead of just looking at last year's demand, you need to be a local expert on next year's demand. This is about anticipating macro trends.
Your team should be able to answer:
- What new companies are opening offices in our area?
- What major conventions, concerts, or sporting events are confirmed for the next 18 months?
- Are new airlines or routes being added to our local airport?
The Data Problem: Manually finding these answers is a nightmare. It means someone has to spend hours every week scraping websites, reading local business journals, and compiling it all into a spreadsheet that's outdated the moment it's finished.
Why this matters: This is proactive demand generation. Knowing these answers lets you target the right audience long before your competition.
2. What is our on-the-books (OTB) pace really telling us?
Evaluating your current OTB is crucial, but not in isolation. The real insights come from comparison. "Full" is not the same as "profitable."
You need to analyze your pace against key benchmarks:
- Same Time Last Year (STLY): Are we pacing ahead or behind in specific segments?
- Budget: How are we tracking toward our financial goals?
- The Market (STR data): Are we pacing ahead of last year but behind the market? This is a critical red flag.
The Data Problem: Getting this level of detail is notoriously tricky. Your PMS might show you raw OTB, but can it easily overlay STLY, budget, and market data, all segmented? For most hotels, this means manually pulling multiple reports into a complex Excel file, wasting valuable time you could be using to act on the data.
Why this matters: Pace is your earliest warning system. It tells you how you are filling, not just if you are filling.
3. How are guest behavioral patterns changing?
The "who" and "how" of bookings are changing faster than ever. Your historical data from three years ago—or even three months ago—may be irrelevant.
You must be constantly tracking the subtle shifts:
- Booking Windows: Are they shrinking?
- Ancillary Spend: Are guests adding F&B, spa, or other packages?
- Channel Mix: Where is the business coming from?
- Length of Stay: Are "bleisure" trips actually extending stays?
The Data Problem: This data lives in silos. Booking windows are in your PMS, ancillary spend is in your POS, and channel mix is in your channel manager. Getting a single, unified view of a guest's behavior is nearly impossible. You're forced to make decisions based on incomplete data and use your "gut feelings."
Why this matters: This data reveals how to effectively sell to your guests. If booking windows are shrinking, your marketing needs to be agile and immediate.
4. Are we attracting the right guests (and are they happy)?
This is the most critical question. Not all revenue is good revenue.
Chasing high occupancy with the wrong guests—the ones who drain resources and never return—is a losing strategy. The goal is to attract the right guests. This is where reputation becomes your #1 predictive metric.
A solid reputation is the best indicator of future success.
The Data Problem: Like behavioral data, your reputation KPIs (NPS, review sentiment, repeat guest rates) live in different systems. They're in your survey tools, on review sites, and buried in your PMS. They are rarely viewed side by side with your OTB pace and revenue data.
Why this matters: A rising reputation directly predicts future revenue. A declining guest satisfaction score is a flashing red light for potential future revenue problems, regardless of your current RevPAR.
The Problem Isn't the Questions, It's the Answers
Asking these four questions is easy. Answering them consistently and accurately is the hard part.
This is the gap where most hotel strategies fail. We are drowning in data but starving for insight. We're stuck in Excel hell, trying to manually connect data from the PMS, M&E, POS, STR, and guest survey platforms. It’s an inefficient, error-prone process.
To make informed, future-focused decisions, you need the correct data presented in an actionable way.
This is precisely where a modern Hotel Business Intelligence (BI) tool becomes essential. Tools like Demand Calendar are explicitly designed to solve this problem. They automatically aggregate all these data sources—your PMS, market data, future demand drivers, and even guest reputation—into a single, clear dashboard.
They move you from manually digging for data to automatically seeing insights.
Conclusion: Build Tomorrow's Business with Today's Insights
The most successful hoteliers I know have made this shift. They treat ADR and RevPAR as a final grade on a report card, but they spend their daily energy on the homework—the leading indicators.
Stop celebrating last month's numbers. Start obsessing over the future.
The will to ask these forward-thinking questions is the first step. But the second, more critical step is getting the tools to answer them. Adopting a Hotel BI platform like Demand Calendar is no longer a luxury; it's the engine for a modern, predictive, and profitable hotel strategy.
The properties that win the next decade will have the best foresight, and they'll have the best data to prove that their foresight is correct.
