Customer stories

Customer Spotlight: The Modernist

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“Market Insight helps our revenue, sales and marketing teams form strategies based on live top-of-funnel demand data in a fraction of the time it used to take.”

Konstantina Chatzopoulou | Reservations & Revenue Manager and Villy Tsotsika, Sales Manager

About The Modernist

The Modernist brand consists of two downtown properties in Athens and Thessaloniki. Both are close to their respective cities’ key shopping, entertainment, tourist and business districts all while offering guests quiet hideaways in elegant residential neighbourhoods. This makes The Modernist hotels especially attractive for leisure guests on city breaks as well as business travellers in town for events and conferences. 

In a chat with Konstantina Chatzopoulou, Reservations & Revenue Manager and Villy Tsotsika, Sales Manager at The Modernist, Lighthouse learned how the brand’s revenue, sales and marketing teams leverage Market Insight to understand booking intent in their source markets and to uncover new revenue opportunities.

Real-time demand insights in a dynamic market

Both of our hotels run in highly competitive markets, where demand shifts quickly. Consequently, we have to adjust our rates at least once a day to reflect these changes.

When we first learned about Market Insight, we were looking for a tool to help us better understand our dynamic market, demand patterns and the competition. Our goal was to seize more revenue opportunities by improving our pricing strategy and making better decisions based on accurate live data.

Market Insight fit the bill perfectly. The demand tab shows real-time developments in the market and makes it easy to spot trends far into the future. Since the tool evaluates data from OTAs, GDSs, and several other sources, we can get a clear overview of demand at the pre-booking stage i.e. while people are still researching and looking for the best deal. Getting these insights in real time is especially helpful in unpredictable markets like we faced throughout 2020.

When we began using Market Insight in August 2020, we were among the first hotels in Greece. This gave us an extra leg up on the competition because it allowed us to quickly react to demand changes and capitalize on revenue opportunities nobody else saw coming.

Targeted, location-specific initiatives

Before using Market Insight, our commercial teams wasted a lot of time and energy trying to identify which source markets to target with promotions and advertising to capitalize on future demand. Our previous tool didn’t help much because it didn’t show the market’s response to our ads and where demand for our destination was growing.

Market Insight highlights promising source markets and how demand shapes over time. Now we can see which dates certain nationalities are researching and we can react with targeted offers for them during those periods.

For example, in August we used Market Insight to analyze which source markets were interested in booking a hotel stay in Athens and Thessaloniki. Germany was the top market in terms of search volume. As soon as we found this out, we set Google Ads for Germany and immediately saw more bookings come in. In the end, Germany had the highest production for us in September.

This was just one of many instances where Market Insight helped us gain visibility in markets where demand for our destination already existed and allowed us to turn it into bookings.

The Modernist room athens

"Market Insight highlights promising source markets and how demand shapes over time. Now we can see which dates certain nationalities are researching and we can react with targeted offers for them during those periods."

Efficient, data-driven pricing decisions

Prior to using Market Insight, we had to collect data manually and do hours of research to get an overview of our competition and market trends. Even after spending all this time, we often felt our data wasn’t accurate enough and we were not entirely confident in our decisions.

Now Market Insight handles all the data collection and presentation for us. The tool gathers live information about demand, search volume in different source markets and length-of-stay patterns. The presentation format is intuitive and makes it easy to analyse the data.

The smart compset function is also helpful. We use it daily to check our direct compset and other properties in the market. Having this immediate access to all relevant competitor data saves us a lot of time and makes it easy to maintain our positioning in the market.

Overall, Market Insight saves us at least one hour of manual work a day, all while supplying more accurate and up-to-date information than we previously had access to. Since the data reaches 365 days ahead, we can predict future market behavior more accurately and make confident short- and long-term pricing and strategy decisions faster than before.

Valuable insights for all commercial departments

All commercial departments at The Modernist have benefitted from Market Insight. The revenue management team enjoys the live insights into market demand because it helps them see revenue opportunities and make data-driven pricing decisions.

Marketing uses the tool to analyze demand especially for dates further in the future. Understanding where demand comes from and seeing each source market’s length of stay pattern allows them to create tailored promotions and offers. This helps our team seize revenue opportunities when there is a sudden demand surge in a segment.

The sales team uses Market Insight’s data to adjust sales plans which are always set several months in advance. Having an overview of demand shifts allows them to form better strategies and adapt to market changes.

User-friendliness and customizability

Our old tool was not user-friendly. Its presentation format was unclear and made it hard to analyse data. The information was often inaccurate as well which made it harder to predict demand and make confident decisions.

Keeping an eye on the compset and other players in the market was hard, too. We had to use many tools and were constantly switching between tabs to collect the data we needed.

Switching to Market Insight made everything much easier because the tool is intuitive, and you can learn to use it without extensive training. Now we can access live relevant market, demand and competitor information in just a few clicks. The tool even helps with reporting because you can export data into shareable Excel files.

The Modernist room thessaloniki

"Market Insight helped us gain visibility in markets where demand for our destination already existed and allowed us to turn it into bookings."

A word to your peers

We recommend that revenue and sales managers try Market Insight because it gives a 360-degree understanding of the market. It highlights changing demand trends, your property’s performance, revenue opportunities and how the compset is doing. This powerful combination of insights will help commercial teams make decisions that boost their hotel’s revenue.

"The team spent vast amounts of time on manual market and competitor research every day. Despite that, it was impossible to gather and analyze data fast enough to constantly update our rates in line with the latest market developments."

"Lighthouse does 80-90% of the heavy lifting by supplying and presenting comprehensive internal, market, and competitor data. All that's left for you to do is use these insights to make the right choices for your hotel."

Want to see how Market Insight can help you capture booking intent in real-time?