The extensive role Rate Insight plays in day-to-day revenue management

It’s a tough gig for revenue managers. You’re often running reports, checking rate alerts and making rate changes throughout your day - not to mention all the meetings you need to have with both external and internal stakeholders. 

This is where hotel revenue management tools like Rate Insight can truly help to give you some time back, by arming you with the capabilities you need to tackle some of the great many aspects of revenue management, from one single place. Here’s how.

1) Identify pricing opportunities

Without a rate shopper, it’s almost impossible to accurately identify pricing opportunities in real-time. Using Rate Insight, you can slice and dice competitor and partner rate data so that you can adjust your rates accordingly, all in one user-friendly rate dashboard.

You can see a live, simple and accurate snapshot of your competitors’ current, past and future rates - across all key Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), Brand.com and Global Distribution Systems (GDS). You’ll also get precise tax calculations, with details down to room type and length of stay with no caching concerns. 

Perhaps the best part is that you won’t need to continually log in to access this data. You can schedule reporting up to 365 days ahead with rate shops across multiple rate setups.

2) Identify rate parity issues

Rate parity (or disparity) is a constant struggle for hotel revenue managers. This is because you need to track the OTAs and metasearch sites that you sell through directly, as well as those that you sell through indirectly - for example, the wholesalers who sell your inventory on to their partners, who you may not even be aware of. Rate Insight can help you identify parity issues on all key OTAs and metasearch channels, in real-time.

You can then easily find discrepancies between your Brand.com and third-party channels. In fact, you can view parity issues up to 12 months ahead of time, and live shop rates from multiple points of sale to avoid caching issues.

Parity reports can also be automatically sent to your inbox, so that you are alerted to discrepancies rather than having to search for them on a regular basis.

3) Dig into competitor rate type data 

All revenue managers know that it’s not as simple as the dollar rate alone - to your guests, it’s also about the value that’s included in their stay. This is why beyond simply monitoring rates, Rate Insight allows you to compare different rate types for your own hotels and your competitors.

This allows you to get full visibility of your competitor hotels’ discounting strategies so that you can confidently set competitive prices. You can compare different rate types such as public versus member rates, best flex versus lowest rates, different meal plans and LOS (length of stay) versus multiple-night stays.

You can also identify the need for strategic adjustments and revenue opportunities by comparing current rates versus rates the same time last year.

4) Monitor local events and source markets’ holiday calendars

Predicting periods of high and low demand is compromised without understanding which upcoming events will impact demand in your local market. Through Rate Insight, you’ll be able to gain access to a consolidated events database, and view your events in the rate shop calendar. 

Rate Insight includes a full database of leisure and corporate events for up to 365 days ahead, automatically imported into the dashboard, giving you a better understanding of what drives demand in your market on any given date.

5) Track the results of your marketing campaigns

Measuring the results of your marketing campaigns, including any changes you make to your pricing strategies, can be difficult without a tool to measure hard numbers like OTA rankings and reviews, and on-the-books Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like occupancy, Average Daily Rate (ADR), and Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR). 

This is why we’ve incorporated reporting functionality into Rate Insight - so that it can also be an effective reporting tool to see whether your OTA promotions and marketing campaigns are paying off.

You’ll be able to track your OTA ranking and review scores against your competitors, so that you can justify which OTA promotions are actually worth doing.

You can also connect your hotel’s OTB (On The Books) to Rate Insight to analyse the impact of your rate changes on this metric.

In fact, you can view your actual OTB data versus your rates and your competitors’, track the evolution of room bookings against lead time, and index your property’s performance (occupancy, ADR, RevPAR) versus the competition. That way you can see whether your comp set is over- or underperforming compared to the market.

To see how Rate Insight can help you first-hand, why not take a free trial and test-drive it yourself? Or learn more about how other hotels are using Rate Insight by browsing through their success stories.