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Why hotels can’t afford to ignore business intelligence in 2015- Part 2

Why BI can do what current tools don’t ?
The current kind of retrospective – your rate shopping or production data analysis is no longer adequate to ensure the best business decisions. Yes, you can see your competitor set’s rate movement in your rate shopping report, but at a time when competition is cut-throat, you need to be always prepared for sudden increase / decrease in demand. An advanced business intelligence like RateTiger Analytics gives you high quality market insights for your revenue strategy to respond to opportunities and threats in real time for optimizing business outcome. Benchmark your competitors on key parameters to make informed pricing decisions. Plan and forecast with greater precision with historical and future data analysis.

Quality data is essential for producing accurate forecasts. Production Reports, which comes with booking pace, reservation and budget gap analysis, provides revenue managers with booking demands from all sources of online distribution broken down into market segment. Compare demand and booking pace to identify whether your sales strategy should be in promotional or allocation mode. Analyze forecasted revenue and occupancy and compare the forecasts to the same time last year. By analyzing the performance metrics, they can get a clear understanding of what makes travelers to book the property. Which channel delivers the most booking? Which OTA provides the highest RevPAR? And which delivers the most advanced bookings? What type of package are people buying here? This helps hotels identify their most valuable guests, their demography and the channel they are using for booking, and adapt strategies accordingly to maximize revenue.

Whether it is using analytics to predict customer behaviour, set pricing strategy, optimize ad spending or manage risk, analytics is moving to the top of the management agenda.
To progress on their analytics journey, hoteliers will need to focus on ways to generate insights from their technology investments, connect the insights to the relevant processes, and then link them to tangible business outcomes. Those, who implement business intelligence as an ancillary activity to a routine and integral part of doing business will make it to the finishing line faster than others.
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Why hotels can’t afford to ignore business intelligence in 2015- Part 1

There are two types business organizations today – one who rely on incorporate business intelligence in their decision making process and another who still relies on ‘gut’ feeling. At a time when we live in a perpetual state of hyper-competition, organizations which are using business intelligence to get key insights are responding more quickly to correct things that may be problematic.

Business analysts predict that bad data or poor data quality costs US businesses $600 billion annually. According to Gartner, poor data quality is a primary reason for 40% of all business initiatives failing to achieve their targeted benefits. With advanced analytics, they can improve their revenue by 10 – 20%.

Wikipediadefines Business Intelligence as the set of techniques and tools for the transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes. BI makes easy interpretation of large volumes of data which helps businesses identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights. Sharlock Holmes has summed it up long time back, “Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay”. BI does exactly that – builds insights by placing data at the right place.

Internet has been a great leveler in narrowing the information gap. Today’s customers are empowered with ample sources to get information on almost everything they want to know, social media for peer feedback and mobile connectivity to stay up to date even on the go. To say that we at hospitality industry are finding it challenging to cope up with changing guest behavior would be an understatement. British Airways paid a heavy price when a disgruntled customer bought promoted tweet to complain about their customer service, which became global news. In recent times United Airlines and Air India had to face lot of flak when videos on their customer service went viral in social media.

This constant scrutiny has forced us in the hospitality industry to continuously adjust and refine our marketing strategies. Let’s face it – we are dealing with the multifaceted traveler whose preference changes depending on type of trips. He might not need high-speed internet during his family vacation, but for his business trip that’s an absolute necessity. The way people plan trips is also changing.

Google, which has done a detailed study on consumer’s purchase path, has identified how different marketing channels such as email, social media, display ads, direct search, referrals, paid and organic search add different values to the customer at different stages. Some channels will act more as an assisting interaction, i.e. by building brand awareness – these are the channels which make a customer consider a brand while others will act further downstream, when the customer’s decision and transaction, is made. For hotels it has become imperative to understand guest buying behaviors, price elasticity and changing market dynamics for yielding the optimum rate from the most desired consumer set.

Organizations need to capture information at every stage and correctly analyze it to get the right strategy in place. However this is easier said, that done. In this era of information explosion, hoteliers are overloaded with data, but not enough understanding to map them to business needs. Clearly the problem has shifted to making sense of the data which is far more complicated than gathering information.


This is where business intelligence comes in. Data becomes valuable only after it is shaped into insights, and when those insights inform the key decision processes that lead to better outcomes. We at eRevMax, view business intelligence as something much more than a technology with an ROI; it’s a transformational phenomenon that will fundamentally change how business will be conducted and decisions made. 
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Four Trends to Watch for in 2015 – Part 2

It’s all about personalization

Google has been making suggestions based on previous search and purchases for a while now. Your guest today expects personalized recommendations based on his preferences. As someone who needs to travel frequently, I go into a certain OTA application to make my bookings. Whenever I log in to the application, based on my earlier preferences, the site shows my favourite flight and hotel directly and upfront. It saves me lot of time, and as a result I get back to it for all bookings. In other words, they have created a loyal customer in me. All major OTAs today study your spending patterns to predict what you want, and what you’re willing to pay for. With the latest technology available in the market place, hotels can collect customer likes and dislikes. Access cookies to personalize the online experience, such as recognizing guests’ name when they revisit and display customized offers and promotions based on their previous searches. Customer intelligence is key to delivering a customized campaign to your guests. Social media provides hotels with vital inputs to map the customer’s state of mind and hence elasticity. The more the revenue manager knows about the price sensitivity of a particular segment, the more he or she is able to price optimally.



Mobile booking taking center-stage

According to a recent PhoCusWright Report, mobile devices will account for 27% of U.S. online bookings this year, up from just 10% in 2013. The report also forecasted that mobile will account for 20% of online bookings in both Asia-Pacific and Europe next year. Consumers do not care whether your priority is on desktop site or application. All they are bothered about is their experience. As they switch from desk top to mobile to tablet, they want to have a seamless experience. Brand experience is not about having a nice website anymore. You need to have a presence in desktop, mobile and application. Nearly 45% travellers travel with two or more devices and they are always connected. Working on multiple platforms will help hotels to track individual-level behavior within and across channels, deriving valuable insights regarding consumer behavior and draw an effective marketing strategy.


Dhiraj Kumar is Associate Product Owner at eRevMax. He is based out of Kolkata and can be reached at dhirajk@erevmax.com
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Four Trends to Watch for in 2015

There is no hospitality like understanding. As an hotelier, I can vouch for it. As an hotelier, you need to understand your guest, their buying pattern, seasonal behaviour, market rate fluctuation, global economy and what not. And as if tracking you competitors is not enough, you have to now keep of new players in the distribution arena. Today’s revenue manager’s job is always on a roller coaster.

2014 was the year when meta-search channels further consolidated their position, with TripAdvisor throwing in a surprise in the form of commission based model, and bed banks like AirBnB becoming a really hot topic. The year ended with the curtain-raiser for Amazon’s entry as hotel retailer. If you think 2015 will be any different, you are in for a surprise.
Here are four trends I will be watching for in 2015.
Rise, rise and rise of Big Data

We have been hearing it for the past few years, now. But 2015 is going to be the year when Bid Data is going to take center-stage in marketing and distribution strategies of most hospitality companies. It is the buzz word I hear at every travel industry conference, at every trade show, as if it has the Midas Touch to solve every problem we face today.
And indeed it almost has. Big data by definition usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. As revenue managers, you and I are used to accessing multiple reports from CRM, PMS, CRS, etc. Data overload has been long been a cause of worry for us. What big data does is that it gives us the capability to store data, dissect and dice it, analyze and draw insights from it…and then use those insights to greater understanding of customers and markets which eventually yields innovative products and more valuable customers.

Analytics for positive business outcome

Ok, I admit, Big Data and Analytics are closely related. Analytics is the application of science to Analysis, or as some experts call it, it’s basically data science. We all have data, but it becomes valuable only after you analyze it to derive insights. To give you an example, while benchmarking reports might help you to know your pricing position, it would not be giving you a clear picture on what should be your best position in a channel– which might not be the first or last position, but somewhere in between which gives you the maximum yield. With Analytics, you will be able to identify your best position, which would get you the optimal return.

Hotels for a long time relied on transactional data for customer insights. With the advent of internet, incoming traffic has been important source for customer segmentation.  However, with cross-platform connectivity becoming the new normal, hotels are increasingly finding it difficult to cope up with so many things are happening across so many platforms – how do we stay in sync? Analytics gives them the insights through which travel companies are able to “listen in” on potential consumers’ opinions, needs and desires, and deliver results accordingly.

In next edition I’ll talk about how mobile is outpacing desktop and becoming a hot trend.

By Dhiraj Kumar is Associate Product Owner at eRevMax. He is based out of Kolkata and can be reached at dhirajk@erevmax.com
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Italy based travel agency announces partnership with eRevMax

Italy based global travel services provider Seneca Travel Affair has joined the eRevMaxChannel Ecosystem to provide RateTiger Suite, the industry leading integrated channel manager for rate and availability updates, rate shopping and reservation delivery to its hotel customers.
“eRevMax is the perfect online distribution partner for our business needs, and with this alliance we will be able to provide our hotel customers the best in class technology to streamline their online distribution.  RateTiger’s automated rate and inventory distribution and rate shopping capabilities complements our proprietary technology platform Xenia making it a one stop solution for hoteliers to manage online sales,” said Ercolino Ranieri, CEO, Seneca Travel Affair.

Seneca Travel Affair provides business travelers and hotels, benchmarking and expense management, self-booking tools, web services, interfacing to proprietary platforms or third-party reporting matrices.





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Leading Channels of South America connects with eRevMax Channel Eco System for upgraded connectivity

Leading online booking channels of South America CVC, MalaPronta.com and several others have integrated with eRevMax for seamless connectivity to its growing base of customers in the region.
“Our integration with eRevMax will help our hotel partners update rates and inventory in our sales channels in real-time, enabling us to bring the best offers to our customers. This integration will also connect us to eRevMax’s Hotel Ecosystem for improving our global inventory supply,” said Cristiane Belotti, On-line Product Manager at CVC.
Alicia Ribas, Operations Manager at MalaPronta.com also adds “This integration is aligned with our commitment to deliver the fastest and most trusted user experience. This will help our hotel partners to further reduce their time to update rates and availabilities while automating reservation delivery directly into their PMS.”

Following this integration with eRevMax accommodation providers connected to these channels can update Availability, Rate & Inventory (ARI) updates and receive bookings generated by these channels directly into their property management system via eRevMax solutions.


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Hoffmeister Hotel & Spa selects RateTiger for effective rate and inventory distribution

One of the finest luxury boutique hotels in Czech Republic, Hoffmeister Hotel & Spa has partnered with eRevMax to expand business exposure and optimize online revenue. The five-star luxury property has been using RateTiger ChannelManagement Solution for managing availability, rate and inventories (ARI) across their online distribution mix.

“RateTiger is a must have hoteliers tool in 21st century allowing you to effectively balance all the material variables in the hoteliers profit/occupancy/rates/distribution costs/channel parity equation,”  said Petr Novotný, Sales Manager, Hotel Hoffmeister & Spa.
Hotel Hoffmeister is built in Mediaeval Roman architectural style of the 15th century, sales 45 spacious apartments across various channels. The hotel offers its guests a worry-free time in a Roman bath style jacuzzi, soothe their body and mind while trying signature massages – relaxing, detoxifying and chocolate one or pamper themselves in a Beauty Parlour.

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LaTour Hotels and Resorts selects RateTiger Channel manager to boost occupancy

One of the leading Hospitality Management and Rental Accommodations Travel Company in US, LaTour Hotels and resorts has selected eRevMax to boost its online bookings and expand online presence. Multiple properties of the California-based group are using RateTiger Channel Manager for managing availability, rates and inventory (ARI) across online sales channels.

Commenting on the partnership Lauren Doran, Director of Sales and Marketing at LaTour Hotels and Resorts said, “We wanted to be more proactive and promote our rates and inventory on various channels to boost occupancy. eRevMax is recognized for its product quality and superior service – the implementation of RateTiger has resulted in faster and extensive rate and inventory management allowing us instant control over our distribution processes and online sales.”
The group has presence over multiple cities of United States, Mexico and Venezuela and delivers highly personalized vacation experiences at four-star golf, ski, urban and oceanfront properties. Properties of the group using RateTiger Channel manager can sell rooms from an allocated pooled inventory across multiple channels automatically.

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eRevMax Customer Satisfaction Survey: 9 out of 10 customers trust RateTiger & Connect solutions for accurate & up to date information

eRevMax, the leading distribution, channel connectivity, market intelligence and revenue management solution provider for travel industry, has announced the results for its annual customer satisfaction survey. The results show that 90% of the customers who took part in the survey think eRevMax solutions are reliable and provide accurate & up to date information.

“The survey is important to gain an objective perspective on all aspects of the business. The findings are an instrumental guide for our strategy. We continue to work on our mission of providing customers with the best technology supported by exceptional service and training to remove the complexity out of their eDistribution business. The result only deepens our commitment to helping hotels improve their channel management, competitive positioning as well as optimize revenue,” said Greg Berman, Chief Operating Officer, eRevMax.

The survey results collected from 500 responses shows that 86% of RateTiger customers are satisfied with the service delivery cycle time, while 90% of Connect users think the time taken to resolve issues meets their expectation.

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Oakwood selects RateTiger for channel management and competitor intelligence

Oakwood Hospitality Group, the world-class accommodation provider has selected RateTiger Channel Manager for its twelve properties to manage rates and availability across multiple sales channels from single platform.
“We are looking at implementing a channel management system that helps us achieve rate parity efficiently. RateTiger will help us save valuable time and give us a better overview of the market, enabling us to concentrate on the strategic aspects of marketing,” said Tabatha Ramsay, Vice President Sales, Marketing and Revenue.

The group has 28 properties in 15 cities across eight countries and territories, operates under three brand names Oakwood Premier, Oakwood Residence and Oakwood Apartments which offer distinct guest experiences to cater to different lifestyles. Leveraging RateTiger solutions Oakwood Asia can maximize its revenue opportunity and reduce its distribution costs by quickly and efficiently increasing its distribution reach.