Benchmarking
Managing a hotel without benchmarking is like running an 800m race where you can only see your own lane.
Your budget is your target. Last year is your personal best. But without seeing the rest of the field, you don’t know whether you’re winning or losing.
Benchmarking is built into the SSOT platform, and it starts with your own P&L in USALI structure. Structure first, comparison second.
What it gives you
A reference point outside your own four walls.
Budget and prior year tell you one thing: whether you beat yourself.
Benchmarking tells you where you stand against hotels like yours, same size band, same segment, reported in the same structure. So a 42% payroll ratio or a €194 ADR finally means something. Good, or bad, compared to whom?
That comparison only works if everyone’s numbers are built the same way. Which is why benchmarking starts with a USALI-aligned P&L, not with a benchmarking product.
Revenue is not profit
Two hotels can post identical RevPAR and make completely different money.
RevPAR tells you what you sold. It says nothing about what you kept. Two hotels with the same RevPAR can report materially different profits, because cost structure and departmental margins differ, and those sit below the line RevPAR measures.
This isn’t a small distinction. HVS puts GOPPAR’s correlation with hotel value at roughly 85 to 90%, against roughly 70 to 75% for RevPAR. If you are benchmarking on revenue alone, you are benchmarking the weaker predictor of what your hotel is worth.
Profit-level comparison is where the answers are. It just requires more discipline to get there.
How it works
You choose your peers. The system protects them.
Opt in. Give and receive. You’re in the dataset because you chose to be, and you get back what you contribute to.
Aggregated only. No individual hotel is ever identifiable in a benchmark.
Minimum samples, per metric and per segment. Not enough golf resorts in the set? Golf simply isn’t benchmarked until there are.
Your data stays yours. Leave whenever you want, and take it with you.
Status
Built, included, and waiting on numbers.
Benchmarking is built, and it’s included in every SSOT subscription at no extra cost.
It goes live once enough Irish independents are onboarded to guarantee anonymity, because a benchmark drawn from too few hotels isn’t anonymous, and isn’t much of a benchmark either.
Founder Hotels are in the dataset from day one.
Comparability is a capability you build, not a report you buy.
It starts with getting your P&L into a structure that can be compared at all. That’s what the SSOT platform does, and benchmarking is where it leads.