Project Description

The Westin – How to create an effective revenue management strategy

The Westin Denarau Island Resort & Spa

“ForwardKeys has been able to provide me with air travel insights that are the freshest and most detailed I have seen in my years of working in the hospitality industry. I now know when my key performing source markets are booking for future travel, and plan campaigns around them even before they book accommodation.”

Joe Ellingham
Director of Revenue Management

How The Westin Denarau Island Resort & Spa stays ahead of their competition

The Westin Denarau Island Resort & Spa is part of the Marriott hotel group. The competition is fierce as there is a multitude of resorts located close by that also offer great services. This means the hotel has to be creative and innovative. They are constantly trying to innovate the hotel revenue management strategy and how they manage marketing.

The hotel is located in Fiji and is an integrated resort complex that enjoys a beachfront location. The resort offers a multitude of luxury facilities such as swimming pools, a golf course, a spa, and much more. The resort is a leader in exceeding guest expectations and providing them with an experience they will never forget.

The background

The Westin’s core tasks

The Westin Denarau Island Resort & Spa has many important tasks. Hotel revenue management is just one of them. They focus on selling the right rooms, for the right price, at the right time, using data analytics to predict optimal sales.

Another core task is marketing – the hotels objective is to target the right audience at the correct time to stay ahead of their competition.

In the past, they used in-house generated historical data to determine their hotel revenue management strategy and marketing strategy.

The objective

Keeping up with the fast-moving tourism market

The tourism market shifts incredibly fast and each year brings new tourists from different countries to a destination. The issue The Westin faced was that they were not able to predict who their future target audiences would be, and when they would book. This was caused by the fact that they only had historical data and were not able to view traveller movements from a broader perspective.

Firstly, it had a negative impact on the accuracy of their room rates which therefore negatively impacted on the revenue.

Secondly, it meant that the marketing budget was not used optimally. They misspent the budget on marketing their property at the wrong places, to the wrong audiences as the majority of visitors would come from a different country.

The solution

How ForwardKeys helped

To solve these issues, The Westin started looking for external data that could help and this brought them to ForwardKeys.

We started off with a correlation analysis. In this analysis we measured if our data had a correlation with the inhouse generated data. It turned out that there was a near perfect correlation which meant that our data could be used to forecast their target audience.

After having established this, ForwardKeys offered two reports which would help The Westin with their issues.

The first report was the Destination Report which showed evolving market conditions like who would be arriving in Fiji, at what airport, and what profile these travelers had.

The second report was the Forward 90-180-270 report*; this report anticipated future air traffic flows from a specific source market to the destination. ForwardKeys was able to forecast 9 months ahead, using a complex algorithm that takes into consideration what the current bookings are, what the historical bookings are, route seasonality and events such as local public holidays.

*This report could be created after establishing what The Westins future source markets would be, using the destination report.

The results & continued work

A successful revenue management strategy

In the end, The Westin was in the forefront of their competition as they understood what people would be visiting ahead of the competitors due to our data and reports.

This allowed them to prepare for this audience and get a better understanding of their needs, as well as improve their marketing strategy and hotel revenue management.

Our ForwardKeys platform can further increase the success of this by showing the booking pace of visitors and give hotels a better understanding of their source markets.

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