Posted on

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.
Posted on

AB Hotels selects eRevMax for rate optimization

A collection of luxury hotel brand in England, AB Hotels has partnered with eRevMax to get maximum benefit from real-time rate intelligence and competitor price analysis to maintain its market leadership position. Two properties of the group Arch London and Sopwell House St Albans have selected RateTigerShopper to get live alerts on rate changes and rate reports for upto 3 years in advance.

AB Hotels is delighted to be working with RateTiger by eRevMax as we endeavour to constantly improve the tools we use for revenue management. RateTiger offers the most detailed and comprehensive solution in the market and this allows us to have more knowledge over our competitors and ensure we are competing as best as possible,” said Rafi Bejerano, Director, AB Hotels
The partnership enables revenue management team of the hotels to compare rates and packages of its competitors, like-for-like, at both beds and room-type level while also being notified immediately of competitor rate changes through rate alerts owned luxury hotels.


Posted on

Flash Sales – the future of hotel booking

Flash Sales offer great deals for a very limited time, they can often have much tougher terms and conditions to many other offers that can make it difficult for travelers to cash-in their voucher. Yet some hotels are seeing this as a great way to promote their hotel and show travelers what they can offer.

One hotel I spoke to offered 75% off their standard rate, and this is in London – what a potentially excellent deal. But as a traveler it is really worth price shopping and seeing what rates are on the market, across traditional booking channels, to make sure it is a great deal.

Yet tapping into travelers with a budget mindset is ideal as the speed of purchase encourages them to buy faster.

A few places you can find these interesting deals include Secret Escapes, GroupOn, Living Social, Voyageprive.com and Travel Zoo. I recently attended an event organized by HOSPA – an association for hoteliers to find out more.

As a hotelier – you do need to think of what brand represents your hotel. You need to agree with the supplier a sustainable pricing model on the discount and commission the website charges. Don’t get surprised if the results don’t come in as you expect, nothing worse than planning booking based on a pure marketing promotion.

The HOSPA panel agreed that on the whole, those who bought these Flash Sales were often consumers who can afford to spend several hundred in a daily deal, making a decision in a moment.


 
Advising hotels on how to make the most of Flash Sales, Nick Stafford, General Manager of Escapes Europe of Living Social remarked: “The worst thing you can do is discount heavily to your own customers. I booked a flight and 2 days later received a discount promotion of 60% from that airline. Discounting to loyal customers is dangerous and can reduce the value of your product as they just hang around waiting for the sale,” Nick felt short changed by the airline. “Our offers are for a specific time, feeding recipients needs then and there.”

However hotels maybe trying these new forms of social and digital marketing, yet are still very behind on the online basics, TravelZoo still needs to create web landing pages for hotels that (believe it or not) still do not have websites. Then these hotels complain when they don’t get the results they need. To me, hotels need to get a grip with the basics before trying this method of sales.

The only advice these channels seem to offer to hotels is to think in advance, do not call up last minute desperate to fill the hotel. This is not last minute bookings, these are future bookings aimed at helping the quiet periods, and revenue managers should know the weeks when the hotel is usually quiet.

There are no exact figures on how much these flash sales cost, it will be anywhere between 10% – 50% commission depending on the offer, the location of the property and the brand.

I am hoping that independent hotels are offered good deals, but I get the impression it maybe more financially challenging for small independent properties.

Some immediate tips for hotels:

  • Select the right channel that markets hotels like your property
  • Identify the lowest rate you publish and can make money from
  • Build from this lowest rate, taking into account maximum commission you are willing to pay before you make a loss
  • Look at your additional services – value-adds – and see how you can create a great package offer that costs you very little
  • Get a good idea of how the flash sales members behave to identify the best price

Ryan C Haynes is VP – Marketing Communications at eRevMax and is responsible for driving all PR and Marketing activities for RateTiger and eRevMax brands globally. Ryan is based out of London and can be reached at ryanh@ratetiger.com