3 Easy Wins You Gain with Hotel Market Intelligence

Navigating a hotel rate intelligence solution doesn't need to be complex. The work can be effortless when you know where to begin. Ready to gain an advantage over your competitors? Let's unpack some easy wins.

After considering the features of a rate shopper and selecting the one that fits your needs, you are already halfway there. Support your daily hotel business with confidence when you access reliable market data.

Table of contents:

• Get an accurate market overview
• Highlight parity violations
• Know where you stand
• Bonus: Where hoteliers can go from here

Before we dig into easy wins, we must set the scene:

What does the initial setup of a hotel market intelligence solution look like?

• Your account is ready to go
• The integration of your Property Management System (PMS) data is complete
• You can see your competitors and the channels they are on
• You mapped your room types to theirs for direct comparisons

Now let's get to the easy wins.

First up:

#1. Get an accurate market overview

Checking what the market looks like is a morning routine for many hoteliers and revenue managers.

Seeing how your competitors react to current market developments is a fundamental component of an accurate overview:

• see price deviations of competitors and the proximity to the median
• concentrate on the most important online channels
• understand how every room type compares and performs

That's not all. Noticing when competitors lower or raise prices in dynamic fashion is vital because it nudges you to react.

To investigate the reasons, and pursue adjustments to your rates.

Your hotel market intelligence tool helps you make sense of possible indicators. These can include insights on what the city demand looks like, weather forecasts, events, and holidays.

Overview that meets your requirements and strategy

Configure your overview to display more possibilities: 

• Filter shopped rates instantly—for every channel, matching room type, and lengths of stay (LOS)
• Work with the right perspective—recognize irregularities on your online channels before they turn into lost revenue

Indeed, the perspective should be the one that makes the most sense for your workflow, either from a graph, table, or calendar view.

#2. Highlight rate parity violations

In other words, to solve instances where your direct rate gets undercut by an online travel agency (OTA).

Uncovering price issues on Booking or Expedia, for example, requires live information and probing in-depth.

The approach of comparing apples to apples is to break down the price by room type and channel. This way you see a double room on your own website next to a double room on Booking and Expedia.

On top of this, toggling the option to include and exclude loyalty programs like Genius—with 10% and 15% discounts—means you can highlight where your price gets undercut or falls below OTA member pricing.

Seeing rate parity violations appear can answer many questions:

• How many exist per day?
• On what channels?
• Which rooms are affected?

So how can you judge each rate disparity issue?

It's simple. Make use of the orange color-coded scale that informs you of the severity for each case (see below).

#3. Know where you stand

In essence, understanding when not to sell yourself short.

You will want to optimize your standing against the competition in the most strategic way possible. How can you determine this for your hotel?

By taking advantage of this nifty solution—we call it the Price Rating Matrix:

Focus on your reputation and pricing

A coordinate system displays the following for every competitor of yours:

• Their aggregated review rating (x-axis) and
• Their room price (y-axis) all in relation to your own

Here's what this might look like for a given day, with your hotel at the center.

In essence, you want to keep your competitors above the diagonal line.

Above the line means:

• they either have a higher rating and sell for more or
• have a lower rating and sell for less than you do

There are more factors to consider before adjusting your rates.

But the Price Rating Matrix gives you a great high-level view of where you stand and what potential exists.

Where Can You Go From Here?

To Orientate and position yourself in the market in the best way possible is easy to achieve when leveraging quick wins like the ones above.

We are confident these tips will give you a solid foundation.

And it goes without saying; there's a lot to revenue management.

• Short-term yielding and long-term strategies
• Budgeting, forecasting, and hotel market segmentation
• And the list goes on

What's the natural next step you can take?

Graduate to more in-depth market analyses. Recognize demand drivers and monitor macro markets in your area; these become important considerations.