Spending enough time in hotels, you learn that a rising RevPAR figure doesn't always mean a healthier business. National Minimum Wage, PRSI and energy costs are climbing at the same time, and margin doesn't move just because top-line revenue does. The hotels pulling ahead right now aren't necessarily the ones with the highest rate. They're the ones finding ways to protect the revenue they’re already making and finding the pockets they’re missing.

Here's where I'd start looking.

The cost you're not seeing on the booking

Every hotelier knows OTA commission when they see it, but fewer are pricing in what sits behind it. A booking through an OTA isn't just the 15-20% commission hit. There's a cost of doing business attached to virtual credit card payments too, and it's easy to miss because it doesn't arrive with the same label as commission.

There's a second cost, and it's the one that makes a huge difference. If you don't collect the guest's own details at the point of booking, you haven't just processed a stay. You've lost the chance to build a relationship with that guest, which means your cost of acquiring them next time starts from zero all over again. Protecting your profit margin isn't only about negotiating harder with OTAs. It's about making sure every booking, wherever it comes from, leaves you with something you can use for the next one.

Data needs to explore

Ask hoteliers whether you’re short of data and if it is doing anything useful to help your operations and revenue goals. Data is king, but only when it's sitting in front of the person who needs to act on it, at the right moment. The value in your data isn't in collecting it, it's in sharing it across teams making decisions, rather than letting it sit in one department's spreadsheet while another team makes a call with half the picture.

Gut feeling still has a place. It just shouldn't work alone.

There's nothing wrong with gut feel. Experienced hoteliers have earned theirs, but gut feeling gets more intense when it's paired with shopping data on competitor pricing and visibility on what's happening in your local events calendar. Give the decision-maker that context alongside their instinct, and they make a better call, more often, and can explain why afterwards.

Not every booking is worth the same

Here's a scenario that plays out in hotels every week. A group enquiry lands, and on the surface, it looks like a great win with good volume and attention. But load those dates into a proper revenue management system, and a different picture can emerge. Saying yes to that group might mean displacing individual leisure guests who'd have spent more across the stay, on a B&B-only group booking, and who were far more likely to come back and stay with you again.

The group might still be worth taking. But you want to know that before you say yes and not after. You want the reporting behind you to understand the decision you’ve made.

The two pockets of money

If I had to name the single biggest opportunity I see hotels leaving on the table, it is people thinking about a stay or a holiday with two pockets of money. One for the booking and one for everything around it. If the room is paid for before the guest arrives, they're far more likely to spend from that second pocket like the bottle of wine waiting in the room, the extra dinner or the small upgrade they wouldn't have thought about at check-in.

Get the payment collected early with the right upselling in place around it, and guests spend more before they even arrive, and again once they're with you as the stay itself is already sorted in their mind. It's a simple shift in when the payment happens and it changes how much a guest spends without you having to sell them anything harder.

Where your hotel technology comes together

None of this works as a set of separate fixes. OTA bookings, data sitting in silos, gut-feel pricing calls, the group enquiry that needs a second look or the upsell that never gets offered. These are all symptoms of the same thing, which is a hotel running its revenue decisions on information that's scattered across different systems instead of one place.

When your PMS, your revenue management, your guest data and your booking journey are all working from the same information, the decisions above stop being separate projects and start being part of how the hotel runs day to day.

If you want to see what that looks like for a hotel your size, Access Hospitality's Hotel Property Management Suite is worth a look.

Contact details

Clio O’Gara

 087 288 9876
 Clio.OGara@theaccessgroup.com
Web www.theaccessgroup.com/en-gb/hotels/