Valor Hospitality Partners increases revenue forecast accuracy

With a wealth of hands-on experience managing branded, soft branded and independent hotels, resorts and restaurants, Valor Hospitality have received numerous accolades as the ‘best of the best’, evidenced by both owner financials, guest reviews and industry recognition. The company collaborates closely with hotel owners and investors to align their goals and objectives with the overall management strategy.

With a wealth of expertise and industry knowledge, Valor Hospitality strives to create value for its clients by driving revenue growth, enhancing operational efficiency, and maintaining high guest satisfaction levels. The company’s commitment to excellence in hospitality management has earned it a reputation as a trusted partner in the industry.

Valor Hospitality Europe first partnered with Anaplan and Bedford Consulting in 2017 to manage revenue forecasting across the portfolio. With 17 hotels across three different brands at the time, there was a different revenue forecast and format in each hotel which made managing this process time consuming and error-prone for the revenue team.

“The difficulty was in getting a wrapped up view of the forecast at market segment level,” explains Kathryn Kendall, Group Business Analyst. “Each brand uses different categories to segment their business, such as residential conferences, negotiated corporate accounts, leisure groups and online retail bookings. We needed to get a consistent consolidated view and Anaplan stood out to us as a platform that could handle this complexity,”

One of the key benefits the revenue team at Valor have realised from utilising Anaplan is the ability to review ‘business-on-the-books’ pacing, particularly during recent external disruptions including the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis. Kathryn goes on to explain exactly what this means for the business.

“Business on books pacing is a hugely complex task and involves a massive amount of data that is just not possible in Excel alone. With Anaplan we are able to look at upcoming revenue on books by hotel, by segment, and compare this to a past time period whether it be a prior month or year, to track how bookings are pacing and make assumptions on the current versus previous trends. The model updates every evening via Cloudworks so we have the data at our fingertips enabling us to make fast responsive decisions. For example, if weekends look quiet for a forthcoming month we can implement a promotion to drive some additional demand, or adjust our rotas and staffing levels to control costs and protect profit conversion.”

The revenue team will use the data to review the demand and pickup in each market and adjust the forecast accordingly, which enables the hotel owners to manage their finances in turn. Following a three-year period of volatility in the market following Covid, forecast accuracy is more important than ever to Valor.

In the last two years, the finance team have also adopted Anaplan and now the revenue, cost and profit forecasts are connected making life simpler for both teams and ensuring everyone is on the same page. Valor has been partnered with Bedford Consulting for its entire 6-year journey with Anaplan.

“We’re really proud to partner with Bedford on our journey, everyone we’ve worked with has been so knowledgeable and helpful and generous with their time, and really supportive of what we’re trying to do,” shares Kathryn.

To further support agile scenario planning, Kathryn and her team have created a displacement calculator in Anaplan which enables them to review enquiries against a predicted forecast.

“Anaplan can immediately tell us how much additional money we’re going to make by taking this piece of business, or conversely, how much money we’re potentially going to lose by taking this enquiry by displacing higher-rated, later-lead enquiries, and that has a huge influence on our decision making because it means we are really scientific about it,” explains Kathryn.

With so much functionality already being utilised across multiple teams, what’s next for Valor? The company took management of a portfolio of a further 17 UK hotels in 2021, five hotels in Dubai in 2022, and are due to open a further three in the UK in 2024. “With the current set up in Anaplan it’s easy to add more hotels as we expand, making the transitions seamless and optimising revenue from day one.”

To find out more about how Bedford Consulting is supporting customers to optimise planning processes using Anaplan, visit our website here.