September 2020: Hotel Analysis

Few sectors were hit as hard by the corona crisis as tourism. This was no different for Hotel Adornes, a cosy family hotel located in a beautiful mansion right on a typical canal in Bruges. Operator Nathalie Standaert has been running the hotel for years with a lot of passion and warmth. She recently took advantage of the extra time to take a closer look at the analytical side of the story. Read here how she supports her gut feeling with insight into data to be ready for a progressive future, perfect cocktail!

Tough times

The tourism sector has gone through a dark period. Virtually all air traffic in Europe was down for a few months and journeys were cancelled or postponed. "This is no different for us, fortunately since the reopening of the borders we can rely on a group of loyal customers who return year after year and trust that everything here goes corona proof". Nathalie did not want to let the extra time that was freed up go unused. "It was our chance to make an analysis of the last few years, something we had actually postponed for too long.

On a rainy day, Nathalie started plodding through the usual Excel files in search of a clear view on the hotel's evolution over the past 5 years. "Excel is a very handy tool and I can handle it quite well, but visually it is a drama and you quickly lose the overview". After some googling around dashboarding, Nathalie ended up at Power Partners. Still unfamiliar with the technology, but during our first meeting she was able to tell us immediately what she thought were the most important insights, the occupancy rate of the hotel and the control of (staff) costs.

The Solution: Power BI Dashboard

After some research it turned out not to be such a complex project as Nathalie had first imagined. "Large hotel chains have, of course, been working on this for a long time. We were always convinced that for a family hotel like ours, the investments would be far too heavy". A misconception that we often hear. No surprise, as BI was not accessible to SMEs and family businesses for a long time.

"Large hotel chains have been investing for years in the analysis of their data. As a family hotel, we never thought this was possible, until we heard that a license for the Power BI platform is only 8€ per month!"

The financial data from accounting was linked to the operational data of the accounting software (PMS) in order to arrive at optimal insights. As so often, data is only truly relevant when the right relationships are linked across different platforms.

Result

Of course, we had already carried out such an analysis in Excel. However, the big advantage with this Power BI dashboard is that it is much more visual, no dry tables but clear graphs. I also find the forecast function very useful to consult every now and then when planning for the future. This dashboard also ensures that we can easily do the analysis again next year.

Finally, this dashboard is a first step in perhaps a larger project. I would like to include monthly data from our accounts, any seasonal matters, and the monitoring of reviews and ratings is also very important to us. So there are plenty of ideas for the future, but let us first hope that the end of the season will make up for our year.

Test the dashboard yourself

This is how the dashboard looks like:

You can now play around with the interactive dashboard, the data is coming from our fictitious company Mocca Royal, which also operates a little hotel for coffee lovers visiting one of its plantations:

Need help?

Does it feel rather hard to get around with this dashboard? Have a look at one of our Power BI Classes