DOHA: Qatar Tourism Authority (QTA) yesterday signed an agreement with hotel industry data provider STR Global to boost the performance of hotels across the country.
Under the agreement STR Global will provide hotel establishments across Qatar access to timely data and in-depth analysis on their individual performance in comparison to market competitors as well as international benchmarks.
Through the partnership, STR Global will gather and supply data on key performance indicators including occupancy, revenue per available room (RevPAR) and average room rate (ARR), as well as food and beverage (F&B) revenue, other revenue, and average length of stay (ALOS), and deliver analysis directly to hotel establishments and to QTA. “STR Global’s standardised worldwide platform will provide analysis that enables us to see changes in supply and demand from season to season, month to month, and even day to day. The reports, generated with consistency, quality and complete transparency, will feed back to individual hotels and to QTA, boosting our collective ability to draw insights and make informed decisions on planning and promotion activities,” said QTA Chief Tourism and Development Officer Hassan Al Ibrahim.
Over 40 of Qatar’s 119 hotel establishments already participate in STR Global’s hotel performance measurement system. Once remaining hotel establishments activate their participation in STR Global, they too will have access to regular performance data and performance data comparisons between their own hotel and others within the same classification, or among a chosen competitor set. Hotel establishments can also measure their performance against international benchmarks and retrospective data. Current STR Global participants also will benefit, as the planned full participation across the market will significantly improve the robustness and usefulness of performance reports.
“This new vehicle for measuring performance is of immense value to those in the public and private sector working to achieve a more sustainable and mature tourism industry, and I urge all hotels to continue submitting their statistics, through STR Global, for their benefit and the benefit of the sector,” said Al Ibrahim.
Up until the beginning of 2015, QTA was measuring the performance of hotels in Qatar, now numbering 97, by manually gathering data on occupancy, revenue per available room, average room rate and other revenue. In 2015, QTA added all hotel apartments in Qatar (now 22) to its data stock, and launched a new monthly data collection form that automatically calculates key performance indicators using STR Global’s recognized standards and guidelines.
“Today, thanks to QTA’s new partnership with STR Global, we will be able to give ourselves, and our partners across the entire tourist accommodation sector, access to more timely, more detailed and richer data sets, while removing the burden of special-request and sometimes duplicative reporting to QTA that the hotel establishments have carried,” he said. The agreement is part of QTA’s ongoing efforts to automate most of its processes including data collection, he added.The Peninsula
