Buying and selling information over the Internet is a hot business right now, and so is the Rhode Island hotel market, especially in Providence.
That’s why a company that markets hotel data, Hotel-Intell.com, recently expanded its service to the Ocean State, adding the latest competitive information about hotels in Providence, Warwick and Newport to the Massachusetts and New Hampshire data it already offers the hospitality industry.
“Providence has added so many high-end, four-star hotels that they’re competing with Boston, and they’re winning,” said Joseph A. Rogan, founder and managing director of Hotel-Intell.com, based in Lynnfield, Mass.
The company added information about meeting sites at 13 hotels in Rhode Island to its database, supplementing listings for 73 hotels in Massachusetts and four in New Hampshire.
Founded in 1989 as the Boston Reader Board, the company was bought in 1999 by Rogan who took it online in 2003, giving the business its current name. With his 25 years in hotel sales and marketing, he could see the need for a service that would offer, in one readily accessible place, competitive intelligence about Boston-area hotels. When he was in hotel sales, Rogan said, “we all had to go out and get this information ourselves, and people are too busy to do it efficiently.”
Such data would include, for instance, special facilities a hotel may offer, room sizes, food and beverage, meeting locations in the hotel and, most important, what conferences, conventions and meetings have been held there in the past. “This information is from an insider’s point of view,” Rogan noted.
“In every sales and marketing program, a basic tenet of business is to know what your competitors are offering. That’s called competitive intelligence,” he said. “The product we have is a perishable product. If you don’t gather the information on the day it is published, it is gone forever, literally gone.”
The information he refers to are the postings you would find, for instance, when you walk into a hotel and see a bulletin board in the lobby, listing all the day’s events for various groups and organizations, and where those events will be held in the hotel. “We draw that information from about 100 hotels in New England, and we save it in a database,” Rogan said.
So, for example, if hotels in Providence and in Charleston, S.C., were competing to host a huge conference for the pharmaceutical industry, the Providence facility would be able to tell the sponsoring group about similar conferences it has hosted over the years, what those conferences were and when they were staged.
“This is valuable information for a sales agent,” Rogan said. “This is a very targeted sales-prospecting tool. It raises the level of professionalism of a sales agent, who now would have intelligent data.”
A hotel also could use the database to attract new customers. For instance, a hotel that successfully hosts a convention for the Alpha Publishing Co. once every 10 years could take note that the Beta Publishing Co. has dozens of sales meetings, seminars and luncheons every year at a rival hotel, and so go after Beta’s meeting business as well.
Other groups that regularly use Hotel-Intell.com’s database, Rogan said, include: financial institutions, to render fiscal evaluations; convention and visitors bureaus to know how much and what type of meeting business is in town; and groups that sponsor conferences and conventions, to find out about the hotel market.
Hotel-Intell.com has been in Rhode Island for about three months. “Our growth strategy has been in concentric circles,” Rogan said, “so that we totally understand the region we’re moving into. Now that we’re in Rhode Island, you could have an event in New Hampshire this year that could be booked for Rhode Island next year.”
The hotel-meeting industry itself is a “huge business,” Rogan said, “it’s so big, it’s a multi-billion-dollar business and, statistically, it is the third-largest industry in Massachusetts.”
Rogan declined to be specific about Hotel-Intell.com’s fees, saying only that they are “very customized.” He has a staff of four full-time and three part-time employees. He also declined to reveal how Hotel-Inntell.com gathers its information.
Hotel-Intell.com now offers data on these Rhode Island hotels: in Newport, Hyatt Regency Newport, Newport Marriott, Newport Harbor Hotel and The Viking Hotel; in Providence, Hilton Providence, Hotel Providence, Marriott, Renaissance Providence Hotel, The Providence Biltmore Hotel, Westin Providence; in Warwick, Crowne Plaza Hotel at the Crossings, Radisson Airport Hotel and the Sheraton. In Massachusetts, the company offers data on 22 hotels in the area of routes 128 and 3; 30 in the Boston area; eight in Cambridge; 13 in the Route 495/Mass. Turnpike area; and two each in Nashua and Manchester, N.H. •
