Building a strategy for 2020 is a means to being successful, to achieve your objectives. The starting point is knowing your objective, which is usually achieving your budget forecast but can also be, for example, beating your comp set by x%. Strategy is how you plan to achieve this objective.
All these data sets will influence your strategy and will be specific for each hotel. For example, you may have 90% occupancy at two hotels. For one, the strategy for 2020 might be about average rate, because you had lots of constrained nights in 2019 where you sold out too early. Whereas, for the other hotel, same occupancy and rates, but your rates might be well optimized and never selling out (the danger of looking at average in general, in this case average occupancy and rates), and then the strategy is more about selling those extra room nights (e.g. via overbooking) rather than ADR. This is when you need to look at your performance relative to the market, using data from STR, for example.
Your optimal mix is not just about ADR or occupancy for each segment, but about the size of each segment.
You need to have clear visibility of each segment performance: how it performed last year, what was its size in terms of volume and in terms of revenue and ADR. And what was the cost attached to each segment. You need to understand your cost of acquisition and operational costs. For example, longer stay guests may provide marginal savings on room cleaning costs.
Then, when you look at your strategy for the following year, you try to see opportunities in terms of mix. For example, if you see an opportunity to run at a very high occupancy on certain days of the week, you may decide to sacrifice a bit of one segment, because you know you can achieve a much higher profit from another segment. This needs to feed next year’s budget.
Knowing your cost is really important, because if you make decisions based on revenue only you might actually sacrifice some profits. Some segments might have higher ADR, but they also have a higher cost of acquisition, or channel cost, or even costs related to lengths of stay, so they might not be your most profitable segment.
Duetto is really powerful for this, because it will show you clearly your different segmentation, and your mix, and you can have an historical view and a forward view, as well. So when you are discussing budget or strategy the following year, you can try to define what will be the optimum mix for the following year. And that is absolutely key to achieving your objective in 2020.
So, the starting point for me is, be clear on what's your objective and then look at your four boxes: supply, demand, own performance, relative performance, and the different KPIs for these four boxes, including cost. That will be your starting point to being successful in 2020.