Hotels are tasked with identifying their competitive sets for various tools and resources. Whether it be for rate shopping or benchmarking, hotel managers do SWOT analyses and study the hotels in their market to determine which hotels their guests consider as alternatives to their own. Different competitive sets (comp sets) can be determined for different market segments, like leisure, group and convention. 

Hotel rate strategies are then typically made somewhere between competitive pricing, demand cycles, and growth targets. When demand for a destination is high, the goal is to maximize rates and obtain the fair share of the room nights. On the other hand, when demand is low, there is typically a more competitive approach to steal share from competitive hotels. We see hotels drop rates or join promotions to ensure they can capture the little demand that there is for the destination.

It is important to consider that many of the travelers selecting a hotel in a specific destination have first considered multiple destinations to narrow it down. In the same way that hotels do competitive analysis of the hotels in their market, full competitive analyses should be done of destinations where demand may be going.