When approaching these spaces as a hotelier, there are a number of important things to be considering.
The First Step: Understanding How You Will Measure Your Successes
First and foremost, as conversations around monetizing new hotel offerings are approached, it's important that everyone in the business is speaking the same language, and that you are being guided by a consistent yardstick, from the outset.
I have long encouraged our industry to move away from taking a RevPAR (revenue per available room) approach to measuring overall hotel performance. Taking a TrevPAR (total revenue per available room) approach, or the less room-centric RevPAM (revenue per available meter) approach, are both ways to provide a more holistic insight into the performance of your business.
While a RevPAR approach works for budget or simple accommodation concepts, it fails to take into account the many factors that come into play when calculating the net operating income of more complex hotel businesses. Conversely, the upsides of taking a TrevPAR approach (i.e. dividing the total revenue of your operation by the number of available rooms) are many.
Firstly, it allows for a clearer picture of the performance of the entire business, across departments, which is important as you look to monetize new offerings, and secondly it opens the business up to a deeper level of data analysis. For example, being able to see which guest geographies and segments (e.g. French families) are driving the most total revenue throughout their stay, will allow you to gain a clearer understanding of who you are best served selling to, and how your pricing should be varying throughout the year.
For another perspective, and for those who are looking to maximize the use of previously dead and lesser used space within their property, a RevPAM approach is useful to give you a breakdown of how certain areas of your property can be better maximized, by the meter.
Being aligned on measurement is vital to being able to define the success of the new initiatives you implement, beyond room sales, and across departments.