Hotels spend a lot of time analyzing how they perform against their competitive set. But how often do they stop and ask whether the hotels in that set are still the right competitors?
A comp set can become so familiar that it starts to feel permanent. The same properties appear on reports month after month, and their performance becomes the standard against which your hotel measures success.
Meanwhile, the market keeps changing.
Hotels renovate and reposition. New properties open, while some might close. Brands change. Meeting space is added or removed. A hotel that once competed directly for your guests may have shifted into a different segment altogether.
If your competitive set hasn’t evolved with the market, the benchmarking data may tell you a story that’s technically accurate but strategically misleading.
A Comp Set Is Only as Useful as the Hotels in It
The hotel down the street isn’t necessarily your competitor. That sounds obvious, but proximity still has an outsized influence on how hotels think about competition. Two properties can occupy the same few blocks and compete for very different guests. At the same time, a hotel miles away may be a much closer competitor because it targets the same segments, offers a comparable product, or competes for the same group business.
CoStar recommends looking beyond geography when building a competitive set. Factors such as class, room count, meeting space, and other property characteristics can provide a more meaningful basis for comparison. CoStar also cautions that selecting hotels that perform at substantially different levels can produce misleading results.
That makes the real question less about which hotels are closest to you and more about which hotels your potential guests are genuinely considering alongside yours.
For a leisure traveler comparing a weekend stay, that competitive field may look one way. For a meeting planner sourcing a 150-room group, it may look completely different.
Your Reporting Set and Your Real-World Competition May Not Be Identical
There’s another complication: the hotels you would ideally benchmark against may not all participate in the same reporting platforms.
If a hotel doesn’t provide data to STR Benchmark, for example, it cannot simply appear as a named property in your reporting set. The resulting comp set may therefore represent the best available benchmark without perfectly representing the hotels you encounter most often in actual sales and revenue decisions. The same may apply for subscribers of Amadeus’ Demand360 product.
A hotel might consistently outperform its reported comp set and still lose business to a property not represented there. Conversely, an unusually strong competitor in the reporting set might make performance appear weaker even though your hotel is succeeding against the property’s guests most commonly cross-shop.
This doesn’t make benchmarking data less valuable. It means revenue teams need to understand what the data represents and where its limitations begin.
Your STR comp set is one lens. Your real-world competitive environment can be broader.
When Was the Last Time You Revisited Your Comp Set?
Don’t treat competitive sets as something you establish once and forget. Consider what changed since yours was created.
Has a competitor completed a major renovation? Has a nearby independent hotel joined a brand? Has new supply entered the market in the past year? Has your own hotel changed its positioning, amenities, meeting capabilities, or target segments?
Even changes outside the hotels themselves can alter the picture. A new convention center, corporate office, sports venue, or demand generator can shift where guests stay and which properties compete for their business.
The question isn’t simply whether a hotel still exists. It’s whether you still compete with it in the same way.
A property that was an obvious competitor five years ago may now command a substantially different rate, target another segment, or offer a product your guests no longer view as comparable.
At the same time, a hotel that barely registered as competition five years ago may now regularly take business from you.
One Comp Set May Not Answer Every Question
At the 2026 Hotel Data Conference, STR analysts discussed how hotels can use different competitive sets to understand performance from multiple perspectives. One set might represent the immediate geographic market, while another could compare a property with hotels of a higher class or positioning, aka, an “aspirational” comp set.
The goal isn’t necessarily to find one universally “correct” competitive set. Different sets can answer different questions.
For example, a hotel could have a core group of properties that most closely match its overall positioning. A different comparison may be more useful for evaluating group performance, and another may help assess a specific geographic pocket or hotel class.
This becomes crucial for properties that draw demand from several distinct segments. Consider a full-service hotel that competes with downtown properties for corporate travelers but with resorts farther away for weekend leisure business. Which hotels are its competitors?
The answer may depend on the business you are analyzing. That’s why relying on one static definition of “the competition” can leave important context out of the picture.
Look at Who’s Actually Taking Your Business
Pair benchmarking with what your teams see every day. Ask sales which hotels appear most often when a group is considering other options. Look at lost-business reports. Pay attention to properties guests mention in reviews or booking conversations. Examine rate-shopping data and how competitors position themselves across major booking channels.
Your sales team may tell you that a hotel outside the traditional comp set is showing up in nearly every RFP. Your revenue team may notice another property consistently moving rates in ways that affect your own demand. Marketing may see your hotel appearing alongside an unexpected group of properties in search results.
Those observations can reveal competitive relationships that a traditional report does not.
The reverse is equally important. If a property is in your comp set but rarely appears in actual buying decisions, it’s worth asking how useful that comparison remains.
The Goal? Better Context
No competitive set will perfectly capture every booking decision. Nor should hotels change their benchmark every time a new property opens or a competitor adjusts its strategy. But the set deserves periodic scrutiny.
CoStar’s current competitive-set guidelines recognize that sets can change and establish specific requirements for doing so, including rules designed to preserve data confidentiality. Those guidelines also allow companies to maintain multiple competitive sets if they meet the required composition standards.
The important part is knowing what question you’re trying to answer. If you want to know whether your hotel is capturing its fair share of demand, make sure the benchmark reflects properties that genuinely compete for that demand. If you’re evaluating a particular segment, consider whether your usual comparison group makes sense for that segment.
If your performance reports consistently seem disconnected from what your team sees in the market, don’t immediately assume the strategy is wrong. Take another look at the benchmark itself.
Your competitive set is supposed to help you understand your market. When the market changes, your definition of the competition may need to change with it.