Customer Spotlight:

Hotels & Preference Hualing Tbilisi

“Market insight in particular helped us to monitor market demand and see where demand originated for Tbilisi. This in turn helped us to put promotions on online platforms for countries we know are searching for our destination, thus increasing room nights.”

Diana Laperadze | Director of Sales and Marketing

About Hotels & Preference Hualing Tbilisi

Located on the shorelines of Georgia’s famous Tbilisi Sea, Hôtels & Préférence Hualing Tbilisi is a 5 star Business Category Hotel with a French touch, providing the perfect gateway to the relaxing atmosphere and exceptional panoramic views of the Tbilisi hills.

The hotel is geared toward both business and leisure travellers, offering luxury services across leisure, corporate and MICE hospitality, and provides authentic and contemporary style. In addition to its 246 comfortable rooms, the hotel comprises various dining outlets showcasing Asian, European and local cuisine; a recreation centre with an indoor swimming pool, gym, aerobic & yoga spaces; and unique meeting facilities which include the Grand Ballroom and 6 conference halls.

We recently chatted to Hôtels & Préférence Hualing Tbilisi’s Director of Sales and Marketing, Diana Laperadze, about how using Rate Insight, Revenue Insight and Market Insight have provided the commercial team with relevant, accurate data to be more strategic, and make more informed pricing decisions, which have ultimately improved the bottom line of the hotel.

Accurate data to guide pricing strategies

We have been using OTA Insight’s solutions for over six years at different properties and when I started to work in Hotels & Preference Hualing Tbilisi, the first thing I asked was whether they use OTA Insight.

In 2019, I was working on the pre-opening of the hotel and in the beginning we did not have OTA Insight tool’s. In order to budget and forecast we had to use Excel sheets and fill them in on a daily basis, which was highly inefficient. At that point I already knew of and had worked with OTA Insight at a previous property - hence after a few months struggling we decided to purchase Rate Insight.

Rate Insight not only assisted us greatly when operating the hotel, but it also proved valuable during that pre-opening period. It is extremely helpful when budgeting and setting up strategies, you can justify your decisions to head office and company owners with accurate data.

Along with Rate Insight, last year we also added OTA Insight’s Revenue Insight and Market Insight tools. The Georgian market is rapidly growing and changing, and OTA Insight’s tools are definitely helping us to stay up to date. Manually gathering all of the information we need from a sales and marketing perspective is very difficult and consumes a lot of time, this is where OTA Insight really steps up. The biggest challenge was monitoring prices on several OTA and metasearch channels in order to keep our room rates in line with our competitors - which of course is time consuming and the data is very limited, which does not help with long-term sales and marketing strategies and results in poor decision making.

"With Revenue Insight, the system is integrated with our PMS and it immediately gives a clear picture of our performance in an easy-to-read dashboard."

Forward-looking data to improve our marketing campaigns.

In the current modern world everyone and everything has moved to online and as a result online reservations have become more and more popular for the hotel industry, ourselves included. This is exactly the reason why it is now crucial to have rate and market intelligence tools at your disposal. You need to be able to constantly track OTA and metasearch rates, along with those of your competitors, and then act with speed to take opportunities to drive revenue. With Market Insight, the forward-looking search data allows you to better predict demand to inform decision making, especially for targeted online marketing campaigns.

With these tools together you can monitor all changes in your market, in real time, with minimum time spent. The comprehensive data sets we get from Rate Insight also help us to create many of the reports we need, quickly and effectively.

Rate Insight efficiency

My favourite product would have to be Revenue Insight. Working in the sales department, I have to create numerous reports, which takes up a lot of my time. Revenue Insight totally streamlines this process. It saves a considerable amount of time from my working day, as the system is integrated with our PMS and it immediately gives a clear picture of our performance in an easy-to-read dashboard. We previously had to manually create reports from our PMS data which is tedious and labour intensive. With Revenue Insight you can create any report you want within seconds, directly to an excel file, which is truly fantastic for hoteliers trying to get the best out of their PMS data.

"With Market Insight, the forward-looking search data allows you to better predict demand to inform decision making, especially for targeted online marketing campaigns."

A seamless user-interface for the whole team to use

When I began working for Hotels & Preference Hualing Tbilisi, my General Manager asked me to search for a revenue management tool. After many trials and demos I came to the conclusion that most tools are either too complicated to use efficiently or are too expensive. I had worked with a few revenue tools in the past and sometimes it can take months to learn the program and get used to the data and information provided. That was exactly the time when I was offered the trial version of Revenue Insight - without hesitation we decided to give it a try, as we already were using OTA Insight’s Rate insight and Market Insight solutions.

It took me by surprise how easy the program is to use. Me and my team used it for half an hour and were able to get familiar with the tool. We now use it on a daily basis to keep up to date on market trends and demand, assessing business performance and easily creating reports from our PMS data.

Identifying demand in a volatile market

Covid-19 had a huge impact on the hospitality industry. One of the biggest challenges we faced was staying up to date with the rapidly changing market conditions and reacting appropriately. It was at this point when we truly understood the value of all OTA Insight’s tools as they all became essential to the operation of our commercial teams. Market insight in particular helped us to monitor market demand and see where demand originated for Tbilisi. This in turn helped us to put promotions on online platforms for countries we know are searching for our destination, thus increasing room nights.

Having a good overview of the market also helps us see opportunities where we can get our corporate business with individual bookings from public online channels, which of course helps to increase Revpar.

"Market insight in particular helped us to monitor market demand and see where demand originated for Tbilisi. This in turn helped us to put promotions on online platforms for countries we know are searching for our destination, thus increasing room nights."

A word to your peers

I truly believe that OTA tools are a real treasure for any hotelier. It does not matter whether you work in sales, marketing, revenue management or are a General Manager, with OTA Insight’s tools you will have user-friendly, up to date and accurate data so you can make the right decisions to improve your hotel’s bottom line.