Part of the Venue Harmony kit
Is your average booking getting bigger or smaller?
Most operators can tell you what they took last week. Far fewer can tell you whether the average party is shrinking, whether spend per head has drifted down since March, or which of their experiences earns the least per hour.
Averages, and which way they are heading
One booking tells you nothing. Twelve months of them, per experience and per day part, tells you where the business is going. These are the numbers we track and, more to the point, the direction they are moving in.
- Occupancy
- What proportion of the slots you actually offered got sold
- Average party size
- How many people per booking, and whether the mix is shifting toward smaller groups
- Spend per head
- What each person paid, taken from what landed rather than what you quoted
- Revenue per slot
- The three above multiplied. What an hour of that room, lane or table is worth
Look at any one of them alone and you will draw the wrong conclusion. Occupancy up and revenue flat means your parties got smaller. Revenue up and occupancy flat means the price rise held. Both flat with spend per head down means you are discounting more than you think.
That last one is the common one.
Discounting, and how much of it there actually is
Some proportion of your bookings carry a discount. You probably could not say what proportion, and neither could most operators. It is one of the few numbers that can move a long way without anything looking wrong on the surface.
Every booking is checked against the price you had set for that day. So you can see the share carrying a discount, what it cost, and which promotion it came from.
The one that catches people is a code built for the school holidays that never got switched off. Bookings look healthy. Revenue looks close enough. Spend per head has been sliding for four months.
Prices are kept as a record rather than overwritten, so putting your prices up next quarter does not change what last quarter reports.
Blocked time is not empty time
A room held for a private event was not on sale. Neither was a maintenance morning, or a day you were closed. Count that time against your occupancy and the week reads worse than it traded.
We measure against what you actually offered. The blocked time is recorded separately, so you can also see how much capacity you took out and what it was worth.
Revenue by channel, on the booking itself
Which channel brought a booking, and what that channel is worth, recorded against the booking rather than sitting in an advertising dashboard you have to cross-reference.
That works because the booking form runs inside your own website instead of a window borrowed from us. Most operators running ads have never been able to answer this properly, and the frame is the reason.
Cost per booking, and revenue per staff hour
Revenue on its own is half the picture. What a booking costs to run depends on who was on, and that varies more between a Tuesday and a Saturday than most operators expect.
We read the roster from wherever you already keep it. You are not moving your rostering to use this and nobody enters the same numbers twice.
The numbers agree
Every figure has one definition and is worked out once, so the screen and the download cannot disagree.
- One definition
- Every metric computed the same way everywhere it appears
- Venues add up
- The group total equals the sum of the venue exports. Tested, not assumed
- No horizon
- Back as far as you have been trading. No two-year limit, no three-month pull cap
- Reports read backwards
- A report we build next year still covers your last five years