How to do a SWOT analysis of your hotel, step by step

• Strengths: what your hotel does well or has that others nearby don't, which guests notice and pay for.
• Weaknesses: what your hotel does badly or lacks, which costs you bookings, money or ratings.
• Opportunities: guests and money outside the hotel that you could win: a kind of guest, a season, an event, a new road or flight.
• Threats: changes outside the hotel that could take guests or money away: a new hotel, a price war, a rule, the weather.

The test for which box a line goes in is simple: could you change it from inside the hotel? A slow check-in is a weakness; a new hotel opening next door is a threat. Write each line as one fact, with where it came from and when.

A SWOT made from memory repeats what you already believe. Spend the first hour collecting, with the free tools you already have:

1. 1Your own bookings for the past twelve months: rooms sold and average price by month and by night of the week, and which site or source each booking came from.
2. 2Your reviews from the past twelve months on Google, Booking.com, MakeMyTrip and Goibibo, Agoda and Tripadvisor. Count what guests praise and what they complain about, by subject.
3. 3A list of the five to eight hotels a guest would compare you with, and their prices on Google for a weekday and a Saturday in each of the coming weeks.
4. 4Your Google Business Profile's Performance page: the searches people used to find you, views, calls, website clicks and clicks on your booking link, and how your prices compare with those of other hotels people viewed.
5. 5On Booking.com, the extranet's Analytics tab: Demand data for your city, the Pace Report, Booker insights, Bookwindow information, Cancellation characteristics and the competitive set Booking.com compares you with.
6. 6Your page on each booking site, read as a guest would: photos, room names, amenities, check-in times and policies.

Ask the people who run the hotel day to day: the front desk, housekeeping, the kitchen and whoever answers the phone. They hear what guests ask for and what goes wrong before any review does.

• What guests praise most often in reviews, in their own words: the breakfast, a member of staff, the view, the quiet, the cleanliness.
• What you have that the hotels you compete with don't: parking, a pool, a lawn for functions, a restaurant open to the town, rooms for families, a location close to the station or a temple.
• Where you rate higher than them on each site, and on which subjects.
• Guests who come back, and companies or agents who send you guests every month.
• Anything your bookings show you do better than before: a rising share of direct bookings, fewer cancellations, a weekday that now fills.

A strength only counts if guests can see it before they book. A lawn that isn't in your photos, or a restaurant that isn't on your Business Profile, is a strength nobody is paying for yet.

• The complaints that come up again and again in reviews: hot water, noise, Wi-Fi, a slow check-in, rooms that don't match their photos.
• Gaps in your listings: room types without photos, wrong check-in times, missing amenities, different facts on different sites.
• A website that is slow on a phone, has no prices or can't take a booking.
• Too many bookings from one site, so that a change in its rules or its search would hurt you at once.
• A price higher than hotels with better ratings, or a price lower than you need on nights that sell out.
• More cancellations than similar hotels: Booking.com's Cancellation characteristics report compares your cancellations and no-shows with those of properties near you.
• Gaps in the team: one person who knows the extranets, no one who replies to reviews.

Opportunities are demand you could win and don't yet. Look for:

• Events and festivals in your town and the months they fall in, and the weddings and conferences that need rooms.
• Companies, colleges, hospitals and factories nearby whose visitors need rooms midweek, and the corporate and travel agent programmes on the booking sites, such as MakeMyTrip's myBiz and myPartner.
• Kinds of guest that search for your town but rarely book you: families, couples, long stays, pilgrims, travellers from abroad. Booking.com's Booker insights show where your guests come from and why they travel.
• Seasons when searches rise. Google Trends shows how interest in a search such as your town's name with the word hotel moves through the year.
• Changes that bring people: a new road, train or flight, a new office park, a site newly opened to visitors. Note the date each one starts.
• Free tools you don't use yet: Google's free booking links, offers on your Business Profile, a direct booking engine on your website.

• New hotels and homestays opening nearby, and how many rooms each adds.
• The hotels around you cutting their prices on nights you used to fill.
• Booking sites shown above your own website when guests search for your hotel's name, which sends direct guests through them.
• Changes in a booking site's programmes, commission or ranking that your bookings depend on.
• Changes in tax and rules: GST on rooms, local licences, fire and building checks.
• The weather and the roads: the monsoon, landslides, fog, road works that cut the town off for days.
• A rating that is slipping on one site, which pushes you down its list.

For each threat, note how likely it is in the coming year and how much it would cost you if it happened. A likely, costly threat goes to the top.

1. 1Draw four boxes: strengths and weaknesses on top, opportunities and threats underneath.
2. 2Write at most five lines in each, the ones that matter most for bookings and money.
3. 3Beside each line, write where the fact came from and its date: a review count, a booking report, a price check.
4. 4Put the line that matters most at the top of each box.
5. 5Show it to two people who work in the hotel, and ask what is missing or wrong.

A SWOT is only useful for what you do next. Read the boxes against each other:

• Strengths with opportunities: what you are good at that a new kind of guest wants. Put it in front of them first.
• Weaknesses with opportunities: what stops you winning a guest you could have. Fix it before that season.
• Strengths with threats: what you can lean on when a new hotel opens or prices fall.
• Weaknesses with threats: where a threat would hit hardest. Fix these first.

1. 1Choose three to five actions from those pairs.
2. 2Give each one a person who owns it and a date it will be done by.
3. 3Write how you will know it worked: a rating, a count of bookings, a review subject that stops coming up.
4. 4Look at the page again every three months, and do the whole thing again once a year, before you set the year's prices.

• Opinions without facts: a line such as good service needs reviews that say so.
• Mixing inside and outside: a competitor is a threat, not a weakness; your slow reply to it is the weakness.
• Lists that are too long to act on.
• Leaving out what guests say in their own words.
• Doing it once and filing it away.
• Ending without actions, owners and dates.