Hospitality Consulting Services: What You Need to Know
What Hospitality Consulting Services Do
Hospitality consulting services can help your team tackle complex challenges, often moving faster and more precisely than you may be able to do on your own. And sometimes, it’s that focus and external pressure that can accelerate transformation in your business.
Here are some of the main engagements that hospitality consulting services take on:
Financial consulting
Financial consultants contribute financial expertise to build financial models for projects under consideration, evaluate new development deals, create financial reports for existing properties, develop regulatory compliance processes, and audit books forensically to make sure that everything is above board. For smaller properties and hotel groups, financial consultants may also offer fractional services, such as accounting and bookkeeping for a set hour of work each month rather than being full-time. These consultants often have years of experience working at hospitality and have degrees in accounting.
A hospitality finance consultant can work on projects like annual reports, fractional accounting and bookkeeping, financial feasibility studies for new developments, perform in-depth market analyses and act as a liason between hotel management and the owners of the underlying real estate assets.
Revenue management
Revenue management consultants can either be independent or part of a larger agency. These consultants do a variety of things, from strategic revenue planning for the year ahead to daily revenue management activities, such as analysing forecasts, setting rates, monitoring parity, and reporting on revenue performance. Independent properties and those looking to leverage the benefits of Revenue management without hiring a full-time resource are ideally suited to revenue management consultants.
Consider a consultant for projects like strategic revenue planning, developing a distribution and channel strategy and setting a pricing strategy.
Technology
Technology consultants guide you towards the ideal combination of software and hardware, building a tech stack that works well together and positions your hotel for the future. For instance, new properties will need to make sure that the central reservation system works seamlessly with the property management system; a technology consultant can provide the guidance and implementation assistance to get that done.
You also may want to bring in a technology consultant to evaluate technologies for new and existing properties, lead an RFP process for new hotel technology, manage the implementation of an entirely new tech stack or even create a training program that optimizes technology use across your operation. Often, external technology consultants are also brought in for change management projects, in which an existing property completely overhauls all of its technology.
Marketing
A hotel marketing consultant handles all digital marketing aspects of a hotel’s demand generation efforts. This includes creating a strategy built around an individual property’s goals, starting from audience segmentation and moving to channel selection, ad copy creation and finally executing strategy across all chosen channels. The consultant will then analyze performance and adjust tactics. Once each campaign concludes, analysis and insights will be rolled into the next marketing push to continuously optimize a hotels digital marketing performance.
Some marketing consultants (especially larger firms) work on complete revenue projects, combining digital marketing campaigns with a holistic revenue management strategy. Others focus specifically on marketing your hotel across all relevant digital channels, as well as crafting promotions for newsletters and loyalty campaigns. Targeted projects are also great engagements for marketing consultants; this focuses efforts around a specific outcome, such as getting more group sales for your hotel.
Management Consulting
Hospitality management consultants are top-grade advisors, assisting hotels with projects managing change, optimizing operations, and generally improving the profitability and overall health of the property, hotel group, or portfolio.
The broad scope and intensive nature of the work mean that management consultants are rarely seen at smaller properties. These are the big guns, brought out to solve complex challenges and major issues affecting performance and profitability.
Projects that management consultants take on include developing growth strategies, enhancing recruitment and retention, entering new markets with a strong go-to-market strategy, increasing staff productivity, building a digital transformation strategy, and developing operational plans to decrease costs and boost profitability.
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