The American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) F&B Council has developed a metric for the hotel industry to quantify F&B revenues.
The F&B STAR Benchmark Report, created by an AH&LA-appointed task force and STR, aims to allow individual properties to benchmark against other hotels within their brand and their competitive set. Other expected benefits include improved forecasting and operations planning for food and beverage directors, new information to allow general managers and owners to gauge local market potential for F&B and the ability for directors of sales and marketing and directors of catering to make better booking decisions thanks to enhanced context for evaluating groups and events.
The F&B STAR Benchmark Report will require F&B data such as total catering and banquet revenue; total square footage of catering and banquet space; total F&B venues revenue; total number of seats for F&B venues; total customers for F&B venues; and total in-room dining revenue. It is anticipated that the data stream will be expanded later.
AH&LA currently is asking the major brands to develop data feeds no later than January, after which STR will build a database and generate reporting. A cost structure for the F&B STAR Benchmark Report has yet to be determined, but participating hotels will receive industry-level data at no charge.
“This gives you a much bigger picture of what the asset is,” said Vince Barrett, vice president of F&B for New Castle Hotels and a member of the task force that developed the report. “It gives us the opportunity to challenge owners to invest in F&B. It puts numbers to it — it eliminates relying just on emotion and passion because there are hard facts.”