Hotel competitor analysis beyond the rate shop

Hotel competitor analysis starts with a comp set: the four to seven hotels a guest would genuinely book instead of yours. You measure performance against it, you watch its rates, and then you watch what a rate shop misses: reviews, direct booking offers, packages, ads and events. The rate checks get the attention; the last list is where the useful surprises tend to be.

Build a comp set guests would recognise

A comp set is not "every hotel near us". It is the hotels that win when you lose. The competitive set idea is the same in every industry; hotels just formalise it.

Choose on what guests compare: location, class, price, guest type and the amenities that decide a booking (parking, pool, meeting space, pets).

Most hotels need more than one set. Say you run an 80-room boutique hotel in Savannah. On weekdays your rivals are two branded hotels near the convention centre. At weekends they are three boutiques and a well-reviewed inn. For weddings they are two event venues with rooms. One blended comp set would hide all three fights.

Test the set the way guests see it. Search Google Hotels and the big booking sites for your own dates and note which hotels appear next to yours. If a hotel keeps showing up that is not in your set, guests think it competes with you.

Measure against it: the STR indexes

Hotels that subscribe to CoStar's STR benchmarking get indexes against their comp set, including these three, defined in CoStar's glossary:

Read them together. ARI above 100 with MPI below 100 means you are priced above the market and losing volume for it; whether that is right depends on RGI. A falling MPI while your rate holds is often the first sign a rival has started undercutting you.

Rate checks: the daily job

Rate shopping tools check rivals' prices across dates and booking channels every day. Lighthouse (formerly OTA Insight, renamed in 2023) is one; it does not publish prices, so expect a sales call.

The free version takes about fifteen minutes a week. Pick five fixed sample dates: next Tuesday, next Saturday, a date 60 days out, your next big local event, and a date in your slowest month. Every Monday, record each rival's cheapest rate for those dates on Google Hotels in a spreadsheet. Within a month you will see who discounts late and who holds rate.

While you are there, check rate parity: whether a rival's own website is cheaper than online travel agencies (OTAs) such as Booking.com and Expedia. A hotel undercutting the OTAs on its own site is pushing direct bookings hard.

What the rate shop misses

Rates tell you what rivals charge. These tell you why guests pick them anyway.

Reviews. Read rivals' newest reviews on Google, Tripadvisor and Booking.com. Look for specifics: a noisy street-side wing, a tired breakfast, a renovation in progress, a named front desk manager. A rival mid-renovation is weak for a season and strong after it. Our guide to review monitoring covers tools if you track many properties.

Direct booking offers. Member rates, "book direct" perks (breakfast, parking, late checkout), packages and minimum stays on their own site. A rival adding perks is usually trying to cut what it pays booking sites in commission.

Google. Hotels can appear in Google's free booking links, and some properties can add rates directly through their Google Business Profile. Check whether rivals show their own direct rate on Google next to the booking sites. If they do and you do not, guests see a cheaper-looking option.

Ads. Look rivals up in the Meta Ad Library and the Google Ads Transparency Center. Hotel ads often reveal the package a rival most wants to sell.

Events. Citywide events, conferences and weddings fill the city. Rivals publish event packages and minimum stays weeks ahead, and their offers pages are your early warning.

A monthly hotel competitor report

If you report to an owner or a management company, this structure fits on one page.

End it with one decision, not a summary.

A hotel competitor analysis routine

What Figo does and does not do for hotels

Ours, so judge accordingly. Figo does not track room rates, OTA listings, Tripadvisor or Booking.com scores, and it is not a substitute for a rate shopper or for STR. If daily rate intelligence is the job, buy a rate shopping tool.

What it does cover is the marketing side, weekly: changes to rivals' offers and packages pages, new pages such as event or wedding packages, their Google, Meta and TikTok ads, their Instagram and Facebook posts, their Google rating and review count, and Reddit threads that are genuinely about them.

That suits a hotel group's marketing team or an agency with hospitality clients. Figo starts at $49 a month for three competitors. A single independent hotel with a revenue manager and a rate shopper already in place can do the rest of this list by hand.