Author: CS Ramachandran, CRME
The big challenge for the Revenue Managers, in today’s times, is to manage rates across all a multitude of distribution channels and ensure that the hotels price strategies are reflected correctly across all channels.
On the other hand, rapidly changing technology is ensuring that the customers of today have more information in their palm of their hands than ever before. Travel Metasearch’s have made it easier to compare rates, and variety of review sites to compare products and services have enabled the consumers to have a better grip on the decision making process and not get overwhelmed.
Until recently, Revenue Managers still had the power of forecasting (or maybe gut in many cases, realistically speaking) that helped them to set their pricing for their rooms by market segment. However the emergence of pricing analysis tools from Google and other products such as Hopper is going to set out newer challenges which will test the skills of the Pricing teams of the hotels.
Google’s has been tweaking its “Hotel Search” algorithm to help travelers find the relevant hotels and the best price. With their recent July updates, Google is now testing “price insights” in its hotel search listing results. The Price insights will help a searcher understand if they are getting a good deal or not for a specific hotel, date range and hotel they are looking at. The algorithm tweaks also now helps the user to compare the searched hotel pricing against the rates of comparable hotels in the area for the same date range.