Looking back 20 years ago, it wasn’t difficult for hotels to keep on top of their rate pricing strategy compared to today. Back then it was normal to maintain a steady and uniform price over time – simply because people weren’t checking prices for bigger and better deals. Hotels worked in a structured environment, signing paper contracts (with agents) and selling mostly through print media.
This all changed in the last 10 years as the pace of digital transformation prevailed throughout the travel industry. Today hotels, travel agents and wholesalers etc....have access to software tools and applications that reduce the friction of doing business leading to better efficiencies. Less friction and better efficiencies have helped transform the travel industry with much of the sales and distribution infrastructure moving on-line.
At about the same time - Online Travel Agents (OTA’s) pioneered a change in peoples travel buying habits, making it simpler and easier to transact digitally on their platforms – be it a PC or smart phone, then from a printed brochure.
With OTA’s controlling much of the consumer buying process, in an increasingly fractured market – hotels have had to adapt and re-position themselves in order to stay competitive. One of the most important aspects governing how well the hotel performs is price and how it compares with similar hotels.
The static rate pricing that once served hotels, has been replaced by a dynamic one – changing according to real-time demand and supply trends. As dynamic pricing takes hold, the entire travel buying process has become more volatile and even less loyal. With volatility, now more than ever has the “price point” proved to be one of the most critical aspect determining how well the hotel performs against its competitors.
With dynamic pricing, volatility and less loyalty being the new normal, how can revenue managers stay ahead of the competition?
One way is by fine tuning the price, to match real-time demand. Adjusting the price is fariliy easy and its done using one of the many 3rd By recognizing where we are in the world of volatile markets– the question of Price Parity and Market Competitiveness are especially important for any hotel.
Am I offering better value than my competitors? When did my competitors prices go up? How often do my competitors discount? What are long term price trends? Yet apart from fine tuning or adjusting prices to reflect market sentiment – the big challenge is to find out how competitive your prices are, compared to other hotels you compete with. Although it’s easy to conduct an ad-hoc analysis– it’s difficult to do so systematically or methodically over time.
Even today, most 3rd party OTA websites and hotel channel managers do NOT provide price intelligence information. This or course means that keeping up with the market has its challenges. And in reality, it can take hours and in some cases days to understand where to source information or how to interpret and collate data – not to mention keeping the data sets consistent over time. One way to keep ahead of dynamic pricing, is to use price intelligence software - such as a Rate Shopping Tool. Price Intelligent Software packages are designed to solve many of the time-consuming tasks of gathering information and presetting it in a useful format.
The tools will help you optimize and plan your rate pricing strategy in order to maximize profitability, depending on seasonality and changing market sentiment. By choosing the information you want and its source, you can be sure that the reporting and data you get is consistent over time, allowing you to compare “apples to apples”. Most Rate Intelligence Software packages work like shopping program. This is because they shop around on the Internet for pricing information, whilst keeping an audit book of the data – ready to be presented in a useful format. Rate Guru by Hoteliers Guru works on the same set of principles. It’s a one stop solution providing the rate intelligence information you need for managing your dynamic hotel rates.
Rather than conducting ad-hoc surveys or maintaining an XL database of rate / pricing information, which can be subject to lose or inconsistent data collection – the rate shopper gives you the flexibility to set the parameters of pricing and competitor analysis to go out and source the information - ensuring a consistent and reliable collection and reporting of data. Rate intelligence reporting tracks back information about real time price changes that take place at the hotels within the area you operate. Having this information on hand, allows you
to fine tune your own rates to ensues you are not missing out on market trends as they happen or pricing yourselves beyond what the market will bear.
The Rate Shopping Tool not only showcases the most recent information about price within the surrounding area, but it also collates and keeps an audit trail of price data information. The information can reveal a history or pattern of room rate pricing trends that happen in a particular time across the industry. With the reports on hand, you can be confident in making informed decisions about when to raise or lower your prices according to predicted trends that happen over time.
Notifications serve as instant reminders when there are changing trends in the market. The best part is, you have the ability to determine your own rules for when you should be notified of updates. This means the Rate Shopper Tool is going to work to the advantage of your property, allowing you to set the parameters you want based on hotels within your areas and within your market segment. Forecasting your hotel rates over time can be a daunting and cumbersome process to get it just right - even for the most experienced hotel professional. Given this fact, you may opt to avoid forecasting for fear of making mistakes. Yet today with the right room rate comparison tools, much of the grunt work of collating, preparing and interpreting rate data information commensurate with long-range forecasting is made easier. When you need to keep track of dynamic rate pricing or how your prices compare with similar hotels in the area – you’ll want the latest Price intelligence Wizardry. Rate Guru from Hoteliers Guru is on your side and provides the pricing intelligence to allow you to be better revenue managers. When coupled with the Hotel Channel Manager – you’ll have the most up to date software solution to take charge of your Pricing Strategy and confidently make quick, informed and tactical rate pricing decisions to stay on top of the game. Rate Guru is available absolutely Free for 30 days trial...
SOLUTION - PRICE INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE :
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