Insider: Tracking Your Utility Expenditure Back to ‘Heads to Beds’ for Benchmarking
By Mark Breuker, Director of Client Solutions, Advantage IQ
Many hotel operators’ singular focus is on achieving the highest possible ‘heads-to-beds’ rate, which leaves little time for tracking energy usage. The result: Exorbitant energy costs negatively offset the profits from strong heads-to-beds rates, leaving operators to wonder where they went wrong. And if they don’t figure it out soon, their business—and their bottom line—will pay. Literally.
But this situation can be reversed with proper benchmarking and tracking techniques. In my article in this week's Hotel Business Review, “Tracking Your Utility Expenditure Back to ‘Heads to Beds’ for Benchmarking” I offer advice on how to measure and compare your sites’ performance against an established baseline, which will help hotel operators determine their energy effectiveness as well as identify high-return capital improvement opportunities.
Benchmarking gives any hotel, no matter the size, the opportunity to track and compare its usage, pool resources for greater bargaining power, navigate the challenges of managing disparate locations, and conduct comparative analysis. And those are benefits any hotelier can take straight to the bank.
When mastered, benchmarking allows hotel owners and managers to easily identify outliers in their sets so they can take the appropriate corrective action. And when hotel operators initiate a plan to change the usage profile of a given hotel, they can use benchmarking as a tool to verify that the savings actually did take place.
My article in this week’s Hotel Business Review will explain how a hotel operator can not only benefit from benchmarking, but also how to get started. It’s an easy way to help operators improve their bottom lines.
Sincerely,
Mark Breuker
Director of Client Solutions
Advantage IQ
770-753-3977
mbreuker@advantageiq.com
