Swot the Hotel

As someone whose career is in the hospitality and tourism industry, I am constantly reading articles on this industry in order to stay current on the microenvironment for hotels and resorts. One such article by Salerno, indicated that many hotels reduced rates during the economic recession and are presently attempting to recapture the more profitable rates. However, in order for them to be successful, they must utilize revenue management. By using past history, current conditions, and future reservations managers are able to generate data to analyze for forecasting rates. Salerno makes a point to direct management to conduct a SWOT analysis as part of their revenue management.

A major component in strategic management is a SWOT analysis, where a company identifies internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. By understanding the hotel’s current revenue management (occupancy rates, ADR, and RevPar) and analyzing hotel trends, local competitors, and economic growth in the community, a manager would have the opportunity to fine-tune its current marketing, training, recruiting, and planning strategies in order to increase rates, occupancy, and revenue. It’s a matter of understanding who you are and where you are going in the current marketplace.

Years ago as an assistant manager of a hotel, we never even knew what a SWOT analysis was. In order to evaluate what was going on around us, we called the local hotels for their rates on the weekends and watched what others were doing. Although we had a primitive SWOT going on, nothing was written down and followed with direct strategies. As far as revenue management, we just input the previous years’ rates that were already loaded into the system for the next year, without considering events, promotions, etc. that the county was running. It was an extremely primitive method and unfortunately, the company went out of business within a year after I left. At that time (2001), most...