CATHY ENZ: The Hotel Competitor Analysis Tool, which we've called the HCAT,
was developed here at Cornell University by myself
and a colleague of mine, Gary Thompson.
We designed this series of Excel spreadsheets
to help you think about doing a competitor analysis,
examining your own hotel and that of those in your market
and considering what factors are critical for success.
Let's take a look at the spreadsheets.
The first tab shows us the instructions.
It gives us 10 steps.
But don't be fooled.
It's really not that complex.
We begin by first identifying our competitors.
That would be on the Parameters tab.
If we go to the Parameters tab, you can see that we first
list our own property, our own hotel or business.
It doesn't have to be a hotel company.
And then we think about our competitors.
I've given you as many as 10 competitors to list,
but that's probably way too many direct competitors.
You can easily go in and delete competitors
that you don't want to add, simply, and then
enter any competitor you're considering.
Let's make one here.
Hector Hotel.
And we could keep adding competitors.
We might have different competitors for different sub-analyses.
I've put in the Dining Room as a sub-analysis,
and we might want to list a competitor that's a hotel.
Or we might want to list one that's a restaurant.
In this case, I've decided to list one that's a restaurant.
After you've entered all of your competitors
and all of your sub-analyses-- here's an example
I've already populated-- you can see that now
what you have is a list of your competitors and your sub-analyses,
and then we go to the Critical Success Factors portion of this analysis.
You click the gray bar.
Click to proceed.
The Critical Success Factors portion allows
you to enter factors critical for success and then give them a weight.
I've listed one-- it's location-- and I'm
going to give it a weight of 25%, which suggests
that I think it's reasonably important.
Notice that I have identified six critical success factors,
and I'll need to put in enough weights so that they sum to 100.
After I've done that, I rate my own property and each of my competitors
using a scale from 1 to 10.
Let's take a look at that.
Here's an example of a populated spreadsheet where
I've listed five critical success factors and the weights--
again, summing to 100.
And then I could start to enter values.
On a scale of 1 to 10, a 5 is average.
So I'm suggesting that our hotel has an average location.
If I believe that Hector Hotel has an amazing location,
I might want to give it a 10.
If Willows Lodge has a terrible location, I could give it a 0 or a 1.
Hotel Bright Star, let's assume that it's
got a better location than Willows, but not as good as ours,
so I might give it a 3.
And so forth.
If we look at the overall analysis once we
have entered both the critical success factors, the weights, and the rankings,
we now have a completed spreadsheet.