#hotel rate optimization

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Transaction Tracking and Analytics: Steering Car Rental

Hotel Software & Travel Solutions for Airlines, Hotels, OTAs & Car Rentals

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Rate Parity Performance Report - Europe | RateGain

The degree of rate parity observed for hotels in the Europe between brand websites and the OTAs show variation by location in the following report.

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Reacting to Market Changes in Real Time is The Need of The Hour in Hospitality

For a profitable hotel business, a dynamic and flexible strategy in all the operations of the hotel is necessary! A hotelier needs to regularly study the dynamics of demand & supply, competitors, pricing strategy, customer reviews.

For a profitable hotel business, a dynamic and flexible strategy in all the operations of the hotel is necessary! A hotelier needs to regularly study the dynamics of demand & supply, competitors, pricing strategy, customer reviews, and preferences to develop strategies for the efficiency of operations. Also to find areas of improvement and enhance efforts to increase revenue.

However, your analysis and research yield favorable results when you not only have the right set of data and derive correct insights from them but also act on it promptly to keep up with the ever-changing market environment.

Such a scenario creates a pressing need for real-time extraction and analysis of market information with a consequent change in your hotel’s overall strategy. However, first, let us understand what causes sudden changes in the market dynamics.

What Causes Market Rate Changes?

Let us look at some common factors that can bring a change in your competitors’ rates and rates of other businesses that directly influence your hotel’s performance.

1. Technological factors: Failure to upgrade to latest technology tools for better revenue and inventory management software can affect your business adversely. Hotels need to keep themselves upgraded with the latest in tools and technology

2. Regional Political factors: Any new government laws & regulations and political instability might affect your business also.

3. Economic factors: Simple changes like an increase or decrease in inflation, employment, and higher GDP growth can greatly influence strategic decisions for hoteliers. Something as simple as a reduction in inflation can increase the likelihood for more bookings owing to the increase in buying the power of customers.

4. Social factors: Socio-cultural factors like change in the sentiment towards travel (this could be because of law & order, terrorist activity in the region), preference for luxury, the popularity of new lifestyles can give hotels fodder to leverage.

Now that we know the gravity of influence these factors can have on your hotel, let us look at how acting upon the changes in real time helps your hospitality business.

1. Improves Marketing Strategy: Market strategy has a direct relationship with keeping up with rate change in the Market. Your competitor, in times of low demand, may decide to lower prices temporarily to attract more customers. With the help of an effective rate intelligence tool, you can act upon your price strategy, like deciding your room prices and offers/packages, example non-room services like spa and gym for a low price, along with a moderate room rate reduction. Such strategies save you from losing revenue and maintain your brand value too.

2. Better Pricing Decisions: Price is one factor apart from reviews that influence a potential guest’s booking decision. A flexible and dynamic pricing mechanism is only possible when you monitor macro and micro factors that may bring about a need for change in your room prices. In addition, for this, you will certainly need the help of an advance Rate Intelligence and Rate Optimization tool. Competitor’s price strategy needs to be looked at from a bird’s eye view.

Once you have identified your correct competitor set (for more information around this, refer our blog — Hotels Choose Your Comp- Set Wisely), you can streamline your competition rate monitoring process to bring the needed changes as and when they arrive. Your competitor may decide to stick with a fixed price in times of low demand, for example. You can leverage this development by focusing more on profitable bookings through dynamic pricing and offering special deals, thereby performing well despite low occupancy.

3. Better Channel Performance: By using an online channel distribution tool, you can find out which booking channels are performing well in the market at a selected booking period. A Recent development of increase in mobile phone bookings has increased overall online bookings, prodding some hoteliers to offer incentives to mobile app booking guests. You can benefit from this change if you promptly decide to focus on mobile phone support for your website to bring more direct bookings to your hotel.

4. Better Pricing Decisions: Several macroeconomic changes in the business environment can directly influence your pricing decisions. For example, a reduction in the prices of some food items owing to a surplus on that category can prompt you to incorporate those food items in your hotel restaurant menu, hence meeting your cost-cutting requirements. Consider another example, wherein you witness a reduction in prices of airline bookings, which almost airways happen due to lower demand. You can respond by reducing your prices as well to handle and foresee the impact of the new development.

5. Better Planning for Offers: If you nail what your customers want at a given time, you have succeeded! For example, if you extract data from airlines in your city and witness a domination of one-night-return bookings, it will be apparent that those visits will be business-related because leisure-oriented visits are longer. You can, subsequently, leverage this opportunity by rolling out plans focusing on lower prices and substantial incentives for corporate guests.

The business environment, specifically the one involving hotel businesses are extremely dynamic and ever-changing, keeping hoteliers always on their toes. Such an environment necessitates a quick response system for hoteliers to adapt to the new changes, grab opportunities and stay on the top of their game. Technology tools provide a great support for this.

Originally published at www.sooperarticles.com on October 14, 2017.

[rategain-blog]

Increasing revenue per vacant room is the toughest task in the hospitality industry. In order to increase hotel profitability, tried and tested...

Increasing revenue per vacant room is the toughest task in the hospitality industry. In order to increase hotel profitability, tried and tested solutions are put in place by the combined forces of the management and staff. No wonder some hotels have strict policies to ensure smooth running of daily operations. It will be fair to say that the primary goal of every hotel owner and operator is to boost a business's bottomline. This requires a higher focus on costs to increase hotel revenues. If one goes by the rule book, there can be only two ways to draw more business. * Slash prices such that the rates are cheaper than those of competitors * Offer irresistible, compelling, or completely unique services that can entice the target customer bases The prior cannot always be an option. Of course it will help sell a few rooms, but this strategy cannot be implemented on a daily basis. Otherwise hotel revenues get lowered due to constant low rates. Essentially, economics says that low prices lead to less demand in the long run! Moreover, a traveler pitches money exclusively on value. So how do we go about adding value to our hotel inventory or service? This is where the second factor steps in. One can simply create or promote special deals through rate intelligence. A package is a smart way of masking the actual room rate. Besides, a hotelier would always have to understand and employ management tactics to drive hotel revenue higher up; this can be done by monitoring and adjusting rates as per fluctuations within the current and future occupancy demand. A hotel can predict this data by investing in market share reports prepared by research firms for a genuine business insight. Besides, they have to apply a robust revenue management strategy for guaranteed hotel's profitability. Hotel marketing intelligence revolves around online travel agencies. These OTAs can boost the revenue by smartly identifying the target market. But they charge a sizable amount; this might help increase occupancy as well as impact the bottom line. A better workaround with guaranteed results is a rate intelligence tool. It renders a competitive rate analysis through powerful application programming interfaces that ultimately help to build a two-way connectivity between OTAs and hotel rates, through systematic channel management. Therefore, as a part of a hotel's marketing intelligence, channel management can help you yield up prices during high demand. At low demand junctures, channels can be used to drive the occupancy rates up. Hence, obtaining an optimized hotel listing is important. When done through a dynamic pricing approach, best adjusted prices can be obtained. This is as per demand and occupancy, which eventually lead to the best highest possible hotel profitability figures.

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Aqua Hotels, a leading group of stylish hotels rendering excellent value and lifestyle services, recently connected with RateGain to automate their entire Revenue Management process. This step is an endeavor to improve the overall RevPAR of the Costa Brava based Hotel chain. Rategain’s powerful price optimization tool – RevGain, will help the hotel maximize itsRead more

Rategain’s powerful price optimization tool – RevGain, will help the hotel maximize its rate opportunities across a wide distribution network. From now on, with RateGain’s services, the hotel will have a far more effective pricing strategy across its transient business segment.