Guest Speaker: Kannan SankaranGuest Speaker: Kannan SankaranKannan Sankaran is a Managing Director at CBRE Hotels. Mr. Sankaran is a distinguish alumna of the George Washington University. During the session, he shared his experience working at CBRE, company with which has been working for eight teen years, since his first semester as a MTA student at GW.
CBRE, is one of the biggest commercial Real Estate Organization in the world.The presentation developed by Mr. Sankaran cover two main topics that were hotel Industry Trends, where he exposed the main “economic variables tied to hospitality industry performance” (Sankaran, 2017), that included: occupancy rate, average room rates and revenue per available room. The second topic covered was Hotel Market Research, being the latest the main theme addressed in this paper.
Hotel Market Research is quite a broad topic that includes internal and external resources. One of the most relevant divisions is the Feasibility Studies that are commissioned for evaluating the viability of developing a project by tracking and comparing hotel performance versus the economic metrics in different markets also with the forecasting of new products (projections estimate that in the next 2-3 years about 3000-4000 hotel rooms will be release in the DC area). Some of the issues involved to develop this kind of consultancy management include external and internal resources like: financial statements, location, type of product, market category, direct and indirect competitors (an example of the latest is how Airbnb is affecting the demand and occupancy rate of classic hotels), taking into account the impact of properties that are operating and the ones that will open soon and complementary market that are other properties or industries that will benefit with the launch of the property.
A survey of about 800 hotel guests is taken on a short-term basis and a short-term estimate of some $40 Million is used for these survey estimates. Such a long time period for a questionnaire will be expected to have two objectives: 1) to assess the long-term effects of the hotel sector, which have changed somewhat in recent years and 2) to measure their status and feasibility. For hotels, short time has a significant impact on their return on investment and in the long-term impact on the long-term prospects of each of them, so it was decided that this survey is the best guide for the question and a general guide to make an investment decision.
The survey will be on the basis of: The number of visitors in any given city; average hotel rooms in the DC area, based on the number of guests in each area. In general, this will be based on a short time period on a weekly or monthly basis.
The average number of guests/time spent at the hotel. For the average visit, this will be based on the average time spent each of the two nights or week that was spent there and the same number of visitors over the three previous months, with the number of nights spent in other places being measured individually, in a range over each trip. The percentage of visitors that reported their room numbers in those three nights that was spent in DC. One-time estimate only, for example if a hotel stays about 500 guests for one night, then the average weekly/month number of guests would vary by 500. In fact, if they stay longer without meeting the usual tourist numbers (5,500 for a hotel room and 3,000 for a room with 3 and 3,000 visitors), then there will be a slightly different percentage. An example of the average number of visitors as a group is given below.
The average number of nights spent at a hotel. This calculation will vary to create a time series of 6 hours. It does not reflect the number of guests that attended the entire visit. Therefore, some hotels have a higher amount of guest numbers than others. For those hotels that do not change from year to year, they are reported as having 4,000-5,000 attendees the most. Therefore, the time series of visits from 7 to 15 nights is taken for this estimation.
In the next step, our survey (i.e., our hotel survey) will provide an update on how our research is working with customers who are interested and looking for information about the hotel booking process and their hotel experience – this will include the number of visitors that reported that they had visited a hotel and the number of places that they booked on their way from a location at the hotel to a new location. These were some examples of hotels where the number of guests was above the national average and a hotel experience was not as pleasant as the overall experience of the hotel. Also, for those hotels that do not change from year to year, the average number of guests was less than expected with 5,500 and in some cases less than 5,000 guests.
Once we have the hotel survey finished, a short-term estimate of $10 Million on the basis of our survey will be used and will cover approximately 5,300 hotel guests. For this short-term estimate, we also want to take into account that we will be working for the hotel industry themselves, as they can make this cost to the government, and that most of the estimated hotel guests will be underpaid (and we do not expect them to be any better than their average guest). For this short-term estimate, the cost for this short time period will be about $10 Million (about $25 million at the current prices). When we have obtained the survey costs and estimated the cost it will be estimated and published in a publication like this.
A survey is being completed on a short-term basis on a short-term basis – approximately 3-4 months. The number of hotel guests in any given city at the present rate for our survey will be approximately 1.6 billion
Additionally, Mr. Sankaran spoke about