General

What is rate intelligence and how to supercharge your pricing strategy?

As global inflation is soaring and the long-awaited recession is around the corner, consumers all over the world are becoming more price-sensitive, and businesses have started to invest more time in the art of pricing. Transferring the cost increases to the guests is a hard decision in a competitive market, and many properties watch their competitors in the same or similar markets to take action. This brings the need for market and rates intelligence products in the hospitality industry as it allows businesses to track their own and competitors’ pricing data instantly.

As a rule of thumb, intelligence products offer one of the best returns on investment in the field of business. Beating the competition needs to be one step ahead therefore, intelligence products provide the required information to make your strategic and tactical moves with the optimum results. Providing crucial information to analyze the market and rate intelligence products in the hospitality industry is one of the must-have instruments of success in the field. In addition to that, the implementation of artificial intelligence for pricing is also a hot topic. AI-powered pricing allows businesses to yield the best possible revenue without losing the market share. As the pricing strategies are crucial for your business to reach your goals we will explain in detail why rate intelligence matters and what it offers for your business. Here we go!

What is hotel rate intelligence?

Rate intelligence tools are software products that help businesses, and properties analyze market pricing trends by showing competitor rates and hotel pricing trends in general. Hotel rate intelligence tools provide data, and help revenue managers to make pricing decisions according to the data. 

What are the key elements of hotel rate intelligence?

Rate parity, real-time data, and data reporting are core elements of an effective hotel rate intelligence tool. In today’s multi-channeled reservation infrastructure, rate parity is crucial for a business to succeed. Hotel rate intelligence tools resolve the rate parity issue by detecting rate changes and helps businesses to adjust the pricing accordingly. This prevents any irregularities.

Hotel rate intelligence tools provide real-time data for the sake of accuracy, and thus properties can optimize their revenue by offering the right price at the right time. A strong R&D background and a vast network of OTAs and metasearch channels is prerequisite for being accurate and agile. 

Last but not least, data visualization is critical for understanding the data and reporting to the relevant people in a business operation. A successful hotel rate intelligence tool must have various reporting capabilities, including occupancy rates, channel performance, and weekly reports.

The occupancy rate report is created using ADR (Average Daily Rate), RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room), and Occupancy Rate data. The gathered data should be private and secure to prevent any undesired results. 

Channel performance reports are gathered by tracing several properties’ rates on a specific online channel. This enables a business owner to compare a property’s performance on a certain channel.

Channel-based and weekly reports are the most common types of reporting timeframes. Therefore, Channel-based and weekly price changes can be observed through these reports. 

What do hotel rate intelligence tools offer?

Apart from the core elements, there are several features a business owner should be looking for in a hotel rate intelligence tool. 

Hotel rate intelligence tools provide crucial data and insights to optimize pricing. They monitor competitor rates in real-time across channels, ensuring rate parity and identifying opportunities. Powerful analytics tap into trends to forecast demand and yield maximum revenue. They offer customized recommendations based on your unique market position.  

A successful rate intelligence tool and its reports must have mobile compatibility. As businesses are becoming more remote and on the go, mobile compatibility gets significant importance to making business decisions instantly. 

Another key feature is collecting live updates and information through a robust technology infrastructure. As it is known, achieving rate parity is vital for getting the best results out of a rate intelligence tool, and it can only be achieved with live updates and accurate information collection.

Apart from rates and occupancy rates, an above-and-beyond hotel rate intelligence tool can offer online reputation analysis by tracking and comparing property ratings on various platforms. 

HotelRunner offers the perfect rate intelligence platform and solution, RateFor, by giving you all the information you need to analyze the market and allowing you to compare your rates with competitors’ rates, thus helping you to build smarter pricing strategies with minimum effort. You can obtain flawless rate parity with RateFor by HotelRunner. With the best data visualization capabilities, you can access three different report types (channel, weekly, and occupancy rate). RateFor by HotelRunnner is mobile-compatible, and you get live updates. In addition to that RateFor by HotelRunner goes that extra mile and gives an online reputation analysis, a special feature of this product. 

Got any questions? Contact the Expert HotelRunner Team to book a session now.

Fatih Tuncer

Content Manager @ HotelRunner

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