Your Dashboard

It is the screen you land on when you sign in, and it does two different jobs depending on how far along you are.

On day one it is mostly empty, and that is deliberate — each blank panel tells you what to set up to fill it. Read it as a to-do list rather than a disappointment.

Once you are running, it becomes your hotel's performance in one screen: occupancy, RevPAR and ADR for whatever period you choose, plus today's snapshot and what guests are saying.

It opens with a greeting and a Performance block. Below that:

• Daily Summary — today's arrivals, departures, guests in house, vacant and blocked rooms
• Satisfaction — the words guests use most in reviews, split into positive and negative
• Weather — morning, afternoon, evening and overnight, because weather moves demand more than most hoteliers admit

Where the Front Desk answers "who is arriving today", the Dashboard answers "are we having a good month, and what should we do about next month".

Three numbers that answer three different questions. You need all three, because each one alone can mislead you.

RevPAR is the one to watch. It combines the other two, so it catches the trade-off they hide. Drop your prices and occupancy rises while ADR falls. Push prices up and ADR rises while occupancy falls. Only RevPAR tells you whether the trade was worth making.

Rooms out of service are excluded from occupancy, so a room you have taken off sale for renovation does not quietly drag your figures down.

Historical is what actually happened. Forecast is what Amiqa's model expects, based on your own booking patterns, the season, and demand it can see building.

Charts show both on the same axis, so the line does not simply stop at today — it continues, and you can see the shape of the period ahead.

That forward half is the useful half. Historical tells you how you did; forecast tells you what you can still change. A weak week eight weeks out is a pricing decision. A weak week that has already happened is only a lesson.

Today's operational picture on the Dashboard, so you can see the state of the hotel without opening the Front Desk.

Alongside them sit today's Occupancy, RevPAR and ADR, so a glance tells you both what is happening and what it is earning.

Vacants is the number to act on. Rooms still free tonight are the ones a last-minute price move can still sell.

Choose a period, then turn on Compare and pick what to measure it against.

Ready-made periods: This year, This month, Last 30 days, or Custom range for anything else. With Compare on, you set a Main Period and a Compare Period — usually the Previous Period or the same stretch last year.

This is where the Dashboard earns its keep. A number on its own means very little; the same number against last year is a decision. "August occupancy 71%" tells you nothing. "August occupancy 71%, against 64% last year, at a higher ADR" tells you your pricing is working.

The longer view. Where the Dashboard shows you now, Statistics shows you the shape of things over time — occupancy and revenue, RevPAR and ADR, each charted historical against forecast.

You can look at figures cumulatively or daily, by week or by month, and switch between chart values and period totals. Period values highlight the percentage change against the period before, which is usually the number you actually wanted.

Periods include Current month to date, Next month, Next quarter, or a custom range — and the forward-looking options matter as much as the backward ones.

There is a downloadable Statistics Report covering occupancy and revenue for the period, which is what to send an accountant or an investor.

That is Amiqa telling you there is money on the table. The alert reads: "Demand seems high, price adjustment might improve occupancy for upcoming weeks", with a See Recommendations link straight to your Pricing page.

Follow it. The alert is the signal; the Pricing page is the action. It is the shortest path in the whole product between noticing something and doing something about it.

You may also see "Forecast occupancy was higher compared to historic results" — a period filling faster than usual, which is the classic sign you are priced too low for the demand you are getting.

The words your guests use most in reviews, pulled together and split into positive and negative. Amiqa describes it as highlighting "the most frequently mentioned keywords from guest reviews during the selected period."

It is more useful than a star rating because it tells you what rather than how much. A 8.4 tells you people are broadly happy. "breakfast", "quiet" and "host" on the positive side and "wifi" appearing three times on the negative side tells you exactly what to fix and exactly what to put in your description.

Two habits worth building:

• Fix the repeated negative word. One mention is a mood; three is a job.
• Sell the repeated positive word. If guests keep saying "terrace", that belongs on your booking site and in your OTA description. Your best marketing copy is written by your guests.

That is exactly what it should look like, and the empty panels are telling you what to do next. Amiqa names the two things it is waiting for:

• "Your metrics will appear here once Front Desk is set up" — your rooms and bookings are the source of everything. Set up the Front Desk and figures start building from your first reservation.
• "Add historical data to unlock your occupancy, RevPAR and ADR" — past bookings from before you joined Amiqa. Upload them and you get instant history instead of waiting a year to build it.

So the order is: set up your rooms and rates first, then upload whatever history you have. Your first booking starts filling the figures; your history fills in everything that came before.

Uploading historical data is the single highest-value hour of your setup. Without it, your first year has nothing to compare against and the pricing model is working with much less to learn from.