Customer Success Story - Radisson Hotel Group

About Radisson Hotel Group

Radisson Hotel Group is one of the world’s largest hotel groups with seven distinctive hotel brands and more than 1,400 hotels in operation and under development around the world.

When dealing with parity, Radisson faced challenges including:

OTA only promotions via the extranet
Rates being pushed to OTAs and not brand.com
Incorrect yield choices due to rates loaded on the extranet
Negotiated/contracted rates being incorrectly displayed in meta searches by wholesale partners’

In using OTA Insight parity solution, Radisson was able to dissect root causes of disparity and find internal process improvements that could help set priorities based on volumes, as well as allowing them to monitor their progress.

Jeff Wermager, Senior Director of Revenue Optimisation Services, spoke to us about his experience with Parity Insight.

From reactive to proactive

We all know parity is an issue in the industry as a whole. Parity Insight really helped us proactively find hotel level parity issues. In the past, we were in more of a reactive mode. Hotels would bring us an issue when they couldn’t figure it out on their own and we would help them troubleshoot and solve.

Having Parity Insight does a lot of that work for us. It identifies hotels that have parity issues and we utilise the automated email functionality to reach out to them. We review the issue and the hotel can respond that it’s fixed, or ask for more help, information and guidance on the root cause. This means that we can now quantify the issues and develop plans to take further action

"When handling a parity issue at a hotel it saves an incredible amount of time as we’re not having to find all the sites where the parity issues are happening as Parity Insight has done that for us already. "

Education as well as resolution

Parity Insight benefits me and my colleagues everyday by showing us what we can do at a corporate level to eliminate the tedious work at the hotel level. The dashboard allows me to analyse our data, identify root causes of issues and address those with our partners directly. Examining the issues Parity Insight highlights, also lets me see if it’s education we need to provide for our hotels, such as: how to properly load rates or the process of yielding, and how that’s supposed to work with an automated RMS. The benefit from this is that we can eliminate some of the issues that might be just lack of knowledge, or identify hotels who are not doing the right things.

We’ve built templates for a number of different situations, so we just pick a template, send it to the hotel and give them enough information to fix the problem themselves. If they’re unsure or have made an attempt to regain parity, we step back in and work with them directly to solve the problem and eliminate future problems.

Time well spent

When handling a parity issue at a hotel it saves an incredible amount of time as we’re not having to find all the sites where the parity issues are happening as Parity Insight has done that for us already. It captures the screenshots so we can do very quick research on our side to look at the specific rate codes or yielding issues causing the problems. This saves time in the identification process. The email templates are right there so with a quick click of a button you can take action.

We have much more understanding of our parity issues now, so we’re taking more time on the subject with our revenue team. In the long run, we feel very confident that Parity Insight is going to save us time as we’ll have:

Fewer hotels to contact to solve parity issues
Identified the macro issues both internally and with our 3rd party partners and taken action to eliminate those issues before they reach the hotels.

With Parity Insight, we know we’re spending time in the right places as we’re now able to be specific on where the problems are and work with our hotels so these problems don’t linger. As we educate our hotels and fix the problem we’ll save time overall as opposed to winging it.

"The overall product is a game changer. Specifically, the understanding that Parity Insight has brought us with issue identification, as it uncovers the problems that may not have been brought to our attention with the old process."

Data that builds confidence

Understanding our hotels’ performance goes back to the data in the dashboard that Parity Insight displays. It gives us solid data with insights into our distribution challenges both in the OTA and wholesaler world. What’s become more clear is how those two worlds collide. I really feel we have a concrete starting point that has allowed us to create initial action plans for how we're going to attack and reduce these parity issues.

Game-changing insights

The overall product is a game changer. Specifically, the understanding that Parity Insight has brought us with issue identification, as it uncovers the problems that may not have been brought to our attention with the old process. The dashboard is easy to read and allows us to dive deeper into our research on macro issues. This helps us with our plan at the corporate level, which is to eliminate the macro issues that are having an impact at the hotel level.

If you include root cause detection offering, then Parity Insight really helps us understand the depth of the macro issues as it relates to the wholesale market. Parity Insight has allowed us to better quantify the macro and micro issues that exist so we can prioritise and take action to eliminate or reduce parity instances.

"I think any brand or management company or hotel would benefit from Parity Insight. The information and the understanding you receive from using it to highlight and solve problems are reason enough to partner with OTA Insight."

The verdict on Parity Insight

I think any brand or management company or hotel would benefit from Parity Insight. The information and the understanding you receive from using it to highlight and solve problems are reason enough to partner with OTA Insight. The root cause detection offering has been especially helpful to us as well.

Overall this product addresses a major issue in the hotel industry right now. If all of us in the industry are working towards solutions for our own companies it will benefit everyone; the brands, the individual hotels, our 3rd party partners and our guests. At the end of the day, everyone wants to play fairly. What Parity Insight will help us do as an industry is level the playing field for all of us to sell our products on our own merits. I would recommend Parity Insight to anyone in the industry.

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