Forecasting Covers in Hotel Food and Beverage Outlets

In this report we explain our finding that a lodging property can generally use information on its
occupancy to improve the accuracy of cover forecasts in its food and beverage outlets. We examine
twenty-seven forecasting methods. Six of the methods forecast covers using only an outlet’s
historical data, while the others include information on the property’s occupancy. We conducted
our study using four hotels that have a total of thirty-three combinations of food and beverage outlets
and dayparts. The food and beverage outlets include room service, lounges, cafés, and main restaurants.
Since we have extensive historical data from one of the properties, we split that into two samples, giving
a total of forty-one outlet-daypart scenarios. In all of the cases we used an eight-week holdback data set
to test the models. In thirty-four of the forty-one outlet–daypart scenarios, the best forecast originated
with one or another of the models incorporating occupancy data. On average, forecast accuracy
improved by over 11 percent when using occupancy data. In those thirty-four cases where using
occupancy data improved the forecasts, the average improvement in accuracy was over 14 percent,
while the accuracy improvement exceeded 25 percent in seven of the scenarios.