Your competitor set is probably wrong. Here is how to fix it.

Most revenue managers inherit their competitor set. It came with the property management system, or someone set it up three years ago, or it mirrors what the OTA suggests. The result is a list of properties that feels familiar but does not actually reflect where your guests are choosing between you and somewhere else. Rate shopping against the wrong properties produces noise instead of signal. You see rate movements that have no bearing on your own demand. You react to pricing decisions made by hotels that are not competing for the same guests. And you miss the properties that are genuinely pulling reservations away from you. How to identify your real competitor set Start with your own booking data. Look at the properties guests searched before booking you, and the properties they booked instead of you when you lost the reservation. Your CRS and channel manager data can surface this if you know where to look. OTA platforms also publish this data if you have access to the analytics dashboards. Then cross-reference against guest origin, booking channel, lead time, and average rate. A four-star independent boutique in your city centre is not your competitor if it attracts leisure travellers booking six weeks out and your business is corporate last-minute. The overlap has to be real — same guest profile, same booking window, same decision moment. A working competitor set typically has five to seven properties. Fewer than five and you have insufficient market signal. More than ten and you are diluting the relevance of every data point. Review it twice a year Markets change. New hotels open. Properties reposition. What was your closest competitor twelve months ago may have moved upmarket or shifted its focus. A competitor set review is not a one-time project — it is a recurring discipline. Put it on the calendar. The goal is not a longer list. The goal is a more accurate one.