Customer Success Story - HEI Hotels & Resorts

About HEI Hotels & Resorts

HEI began as a hotel investment and management company in the late 1980’s and has now grown into an industry-recognised owner and operator of a $12 billion portfolio of leading full-service branded and luxury independent hotels. As a management company, HEI consistently sets high standards of excellence and ensures that all of their associates have the tools, training and support necessary to excel.

We spoke with Jeremy See, Vice President of Revenue Management at HEI, who as well as leading on revenue management for the group, has general oversight of 80 hotels, making sure that they are at the forefront of what's new in the industry, including technology solutions. Jeremy helped us better understand how Rate Insight has enabled him and his team to become more time efficient and do more with less in recent times.

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"We would estimate the tool cuts out half an hour from every day, being able to see live shops and essentially check four or five boxes in ten to fifteen minutes, as opposed to taking 30 to 45 minutes previously."

Adjusting to a changing industry

A big part of the decision made in using Rate Insight is that it gives us the ability to be a lot more efficient. I remember thinking about what we had to do overnight and the need to find more efficiencies with reporting especially. We’ve got to come up with a new approach and think about how we look at our day to day and later, measure our performance. Do we look at two years ago? Or the average of X years? How do we benchmark ourselves essentially and who can help us with that.

I think a lot of the new ideas also need to address how we manage in today's world, not just efficiency, but what goals do we set? Because most everything that we used before would not apply. How do we set ourselves to be in the best position to pivot when the economy picks back up and what would be important then? We took this opportunity to enhance our reporting and proprietary tools by adding to our database. Working with OTA Insight we were able to add daily rate shops data for the next 365 for every hotel, indexing that data to be able to analyze pricing by market, hotel type or the next new yardstick as we catch the rebound in 2021.

Intuitive user interface tailormade for managing multiple properties

The best part about Rate Insight is that the user interface is so simple. It's intuitive and straightforward, which is exactly what you need from a business tool. You open the page and with the colour codes, it makes it very easy to read. We can look at shops for one hotel for the next three months in a few minutes, flip to a different hotel and do the same thing, or even go to the multi hotel mode and see everything quickly.

Having those options is key for us, especially when managing multiple properties. We can show the data to external parties as well as it’s very intuitive.

Rate Insight provides the answers to the questions our teams are asking with just a few clicks and there’s no need to schedule reports in advance, which saves us time as objectives and needs frequently change. Plus, it’s live shopped quick, so the data is never old.

So those two factors combined saved us time and helped us be more efficient. We would estimate the tool cuts out half an hour from every day, being able to see live shops and essentially check four or five boxes in ten to fifteen minutes, as opposed to taking 30 to 45 minutes previously.

"From an efficiency standpoint, it's given us the one resource we cannot control, which is time back. It’s given us time back in our working day."

Regular updates for greater automation and deeper insights

For us the best part about the tool has always been its simple user interface, a big part of the improvement in our efficiency comes just from the ease of use. Some of the latest additions are great in that respect too, such as the campaign mode where for example, we can easily compare desktop to mobile and two nights to a one night shop. Those are things that in the past we had to do manually in excel which is very inefficient.

Being able to see this data compared to a certain point in time gives us a very quick overview from a marketing standpoint. For example, we can look at the dashboard and work out which hotel does a seven-day advance purchase. It's the comparison function that has enabled us to take things that step further. The live shops are vital but having these new options allows us to take a deeper insight than we could before.

Greater time efficiency when needed most

We are definitely getting value for our investment with Rate Insight. It’s difficult to calculate return in dollars, but looking at it very simply, the team is much more efficient and happier with OTA Insight. From an efficiency standpoint, it's given us the one resource we cannot control, which is time back. With that extra time at our disposal, we are able to spend more time thinking strategically or getting that extra cup of coffee.

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"Rate Insight helps you understand your market easily, quickly and often."

A better understanding of the market and historical pricing trends

Rate Insight is a big part of the day-to-day processes of each leader on our team. We don’t necessarily use it to benchmark our hotels but we do like the ability to see a historical perspective on pricing. It gives us a solid view of how our pricing strategy evolved over time and how it compares to that of our competitors. With that understanding of past trends and when pricing changes are expected to occur, we can then adapt our strategy to plan for such anticipated changes to be ahead of any market movements.

We think it's crucial to know how your market is priced and what the rational is behind the pricing in the market. That’s where Rate Insight comes in, it helps you understand your market easily, quickly and often. The rate can change a few times a day in the current environment and we have to alter our strategy accordingly – the tool makes that part of the job pretty effortless. If we didn't have live shops, the alternative would be to shop on meta or an OTA where you may not see certain hotels.

First vacation post-pandemic

I want to go as far away as I can! We were supposed to go to Paris about this time last year. We were about two days away from when the borders closed. Had it been a week before, we probably would have gone and perhaps been stuck there for a little bit. Depending on border controls, we would probably go as far away as we can just be in a very different place to experience a different culture.