About Cross Hotels & Resorts

Cross Hotels and Resorts is an international hotel management company specialised in the luxury boutique resort segment, with some city hotels. Cross operates in three countries - Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam - with different types of resorts such as weekend and cultural resorts, island hideaway, beach destination and luxury villas. The variety of resorts brings varying seasonality as guests tend to be more leisure-based so the conversion rate is lower than hotels with more business travellers.

Pricing and Parity

A rate shopping and rate parity tool is very essential in our current business environment as pricing can determine the revenue performance of the hotel. Before using OTA insight, we were looking for a solution that could support us in being competitive in the market, and keeping control of our distribution channels. 

We were previously using a free rate shopping module belonging to a leading OTA. However, it didn’t serve our need for deeper analytics. We needed a rate shopping tool that supported rate parity improvement, was easy to use so the team could be comfortable with it, and lastly, a rate shopper that was cost-efficient. Rate Insight is hitting all those requirements. 

A tool for all times

Rate Insight allows our hotel to price correctly and to adjust our pricing strategy easily as per business needs. This has been massively helpful in both our low- and high-demand period. Being able to monitor ranking also helps us as ranking is also correlated with pick-up pace from the channels. We also use Parity Insight, which gives us a view on rate parity across key OTAs, smaller OTAs and metasearch. With these insights, we can track the improvement of our parity score when we deploy new policies in order to improve rate parity and drive direct conversion.

By using both Rate Insight and Parity Insight our goal was to improve our pricing strategy better so we could win market share during periods of low demand and maximise our rates in high-demand periods. We also wanted to Increase our business mix from all distribution channels and lower static rate business, as well as lowering rate disparity and gaining more direct conversion. Features such as the demand indicator, rate change vs last period, ranking check and win-meet-loss score have been real game changers for our hotels. 

Real results

This would not have been possible without better parity management, helped by using OTA Insight BI tools.

Using Rate Insight really helps us to understand the dynamic of rate change in different destinations. Some hotels are less clued-up on pricing and we see throughout how they change their rate over a period of time. We can see that some of these hotels aren’t adjusting their rates in step with market factors and this is happening in second-tier and  third-tier destinations, which is a loss of opportunity for those hotels. 

A word to your peers

OTA Insight tools are very user friendly and can get you the right data in no time. The UX and UI design allow users simple navigation plus easy data analysis without need to download into a huge number of Excel spreadsheets. OTA Insight’s support team and dedicated account manager always provide great assistance and Rate Insight is by far the most pleasant rate shopping tool we’ve ever used.