Customer Success Story - Mangrove Tree Resort World

About Mangrove Tree Resort World

Mangrove Tree Resort World is China’s leading vacation destination and lifestyle destination brand, setting the benchmark for China’s cultural and travel industry. It gathers the best leisure, entertainment, fashion, art, shopping, and health resources to create a cutting-edge location for travellers.

We recently caught up with Mangrove’s Deputy Director of Revenue Management, Mandy Hao to discuss how OTA Insight’s Rate Insight tool has provided her and her team with easy access to relevant data, allowing her to make better informed pricing decisions in a dynamic market, and capitalise on market opportunities.

More efficient, more precise

Before using Rate Insight, we had to spend at least 1-2 hours a day manually collecting pricing data from numerous competitors' channels, while monitoring the various channels of our own hotels for price consistency.

It was impossible to update our prices in a timely manner, meaning we missed out on opportunities to make pricing decisions that would positively impact revenue. We also did not have all the necessary information on the different prices and the conditions behind them - whether they were promotional prices, or based on room type, length of stay and so on, and we could not compare packages either.

A lot of time was spent on data collection and sorting, leaving inadequate time to analyse and evaluate the results. This also meant that our decision-making window was shorter, which resulted in decisions that were more arbitrary and lacking sufficient scrutiny. At the same time, the data granularity was coarse, and it was easy to miss key pricing reference information. As a result, the opportunity to increase room revenue was lost.

"Without the time wasted on data collection and sorting, our revenue management has become more focused on decision making."

Greater opportunity to increase revenue

By using OTA Insight’s Rate Insight tool, our team has more time to discuss and analyse the data. Without time being wasted on data collection and sorting, revenue management has become more focused on decision making.

The tool presents us with multi-dimensional data, that could not be replicated manually, and has provided us with more opportunities to increase revenue. Through the delivery of more accurate pricing insights, both room occupancy and revenue per room of Sanya Haitang Bay and Yalong Bay, increased by far more than the average hotel in their compset.

Rate Evolution reflecting dynamic market changes

Rate Evolution is the most difficult point of manual data collection, but it is also a key indicator that has a significant impact on decision making when setting rates. Through Rate Evolution, we can see dynamic changes in the market, or the business changes of a certain hotel in real time. With the aid of this dynamic data, we aim to achieve improved analysis of future business growth - rather than simply making pricing decisions based on a current, static price comparison.

Seamless user experience

The excellent product design of Rate Insight is based on user experience. The user experience is very good and therefore it greatly helps to make work efficient during use. The granularity of the data is meticulous. Rate Insight contains all the information we need to set our prices. It not only collects and provides comparisons of the best retail prices, but also provides comparisons of various discounts and promotional prices that hotels have participated in on major OTA platforms.

Importantly, it gives us price updates in real-time. Rates are updated as needed, at any time, which improves the timeliness of our own price adjustments, allowing the hotel to better seize every opportunity to increase revenue through pricing.

It has improved the efficiency and professionalism of the revenue team and helped us to monitor hotel prices and market prices at the group level.

"With the aid of dynamic data, what we want to achieve is to judge the future business growth, rather than simply make pricing decisions based on a current static price comparison."

Market dynamics during the pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, most hotels no longer adhered to traditional pricing structures. They began to seize limited market demand through new channels of price cooperation. To do this, being able to initially monitor the market’s price dynamics was very important.

Rate Insight provides real time information to hotels, especially to our Mangrove management companies that have multiple hotels, so that they can quickly understand the overall market dynamics, and the localised market dynamics of each hotel. From here, they can accurately predict market demand, and be proactive, avoiding panicked and purely reactive responses. Rate Insight gives hotels the confidence to win this protracted battle against the pandemic.

A word to your peers

Since we started using OTA Insight’s products they have been continuously optimising and improving the product based on customer needs and feedback. OTA Insight also provides complete service support, which is very rare.

Moreover, OTA Insight's product development is based entirely on how to give users the best experience, rather than just providing a fee-based service or a free product with a poor experience.