Who's Doing Business at the Hotel Down the Street?

Managers Need to Know and HIS Can Tell Them

. October 14, 2008

WALNUT CREEK, CA, October 27, 2006. For over 17 years, Hospitality Information Services, Inc. (HIS), based in Walnut Creek, CA, has been providing the hotel industry with competitive market information on what companies and organizations are meeting... where... and for how long. In addition, HIS also provides event contact information for the corporate or association people in charge of the event.

Using HIS data, hoteliers in Orange County, CA can target their pitches to the planners at Mary Kay who last month scheduled 47 "event days" in area hotels. In Philadelphia, they will know that the most active corporate meeting organization, with 28 event days, was The Princeton Review. Or in Baltimore, that the top association, with 21 event days, was the National Congress of Baptist Education.

Since 1989, HIS has been the leader in the "Reader Board" business. In fact, they invented the business, which was the brainchild of Stephen Reiser, who was working in the hotel industry in San Francisco at the time.

Reiser's business model is seemingly very straightforward - HIS associates visit specific hotels in a given market and capture the information on the hotels' reader board.

"There's a lot more to our business than one might think," Reiser says. "Unlike some of our competitors who have recently entered the market, we offer a whole lot more than raw data ripped straight off the reader board. Over the years, we've fine-tuned our system to provide exactly what our clients tell us they need - well-organized, meaningful, and fact-checked reports, including contact information."

HIS analyzes, processes, and verifies the data for accuracy before it packages the information as a weekly, monthly, or quarterly report and sends it on to HIS subscribers, usually hotel GMs and sales directors.

HIS provides hotels with the intelligence they need to compete and increase market share in two important segments of their business - the group and catering market segments. Currently, HIS gathers data from over 1,200 properties in more than 44 markets in the U.S. and Canada.

"In many ways, it's a zero-sum game," says Reiser. "Hotel GMs and Directors of Sales know they can increase revenue and market share by moving group and catering business out of their competitors' properties and into their own. They use HIS market intelligence to increase their top-line revenues."

Using last month's report, HIS subscribers in the Philadelphia market know that their sales people might do well to contact Soul Line Dancing. That organization accounted for six event days last month, surpassing the Peace Corps (four event days), but out-meetinged by another potential source of business, The Cheesecake Factory (twelve).

Over the years, HIS has scored high with its subscribers, among them Jeff Peters, Director of Sales and Marketing at the Marriott St. Louis West.

"A critical component of our sales efforts is proactively and consistently soliciting accounts meeting at our competitors. HIS provides a timely, accurate, and professional reporting process to help us reach out to clients doing business in our market," Peters says.

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