What is a Rate Shopping & Market Intelligence Tool?
Rate shoppers and market intelligence tools enable hoteliers to closely monitor the market on a variety of aggregated data points. The historical focus of such systems is to provide revenue managers and decision-makers with competitors' pricing data and accurate demand forecasts. Today, such systems also provide hoteliers with data such as weather forecasts, local events and holiday calendars that could also impact overall market demand. Ultimately, these tools are designed to support hotels in adjusting their pricing and revenue management strategy. For multi-property operators managing hotels in multiple locations, rate shopping and market intelligence tools are incredible time-savers.
What are the benefits of implementing a Rate Shopping & Market Intelligence Tool?
- Increased RevPar and other KPIs: A better understanding of the market will allow hoteliers to optimise occupancy, revenue, and distribution channels. By making more informed decisions, hoteliers will be able to craft a revenue strategy in line with current market trends.
- Time-saving and decreased operational costs: Previously, it took hours for hoteliers to collect and aggregate competitors’ pricing, local events, weather forecasts, and other data. Now, it takes minutes or seconds to have everything well visualised enabling revenue managers to spend more time on other topics to optimise the property’s revenue.
- Structured revenue strategy: Having clear and real-time data will enable hoteliers to build a set strategy based on the hotel’s positioning.
What are the most important features to look for in a Rate Shopping & Market Intelligence Tool?
- On-demand rate shopping: Whatever date you need, obtain competitors’ price points in real-time
- Pricing benchmark accuracy: Dive into specific room types, rate plans, and length of stay to make sure your hotel is well-positioned in the competitive set
- Granularity: The tool should enable easy and extended filtering
- Market trends: The tool should incorporate local events, weather, and other demand drivers
- Custom dashboards: Create personalized dashboards to align the tool with your data visualisation preferences
- Rate parity tracking: Find any discrepancies between your hotel website and third-party channels
What are the key integrations you should look for when selecting a Rate Shopping & Market Intelligence Tool for your revenue management team?
- Channel manager: The market intelligence and rate shopping tool should be able to connect to your channel manager to retrieve real-time availability and rates
- Property management system (PMS): The market intelligence and rate shopping should have an integration to the hotel’s PMS to retrieve rate structures to analyse them versus the competitive set
- Revenue management system: An integration between market intelligence tools and revenue management systems will enable the RMS to include real-time market data, detailed competitor rates, and enhanced analysis
What is the typical pricing for a Rate Shopping & Market Intelligence Tool?
The pricing of rate shopping and market intelligence tools generally depends on the size of the competitive set to analyse as well the rate shopping analysis window (number of days in the future). It can also vary based on the number of competitive sets for multi-property operators as well as the access to the API for further analysis. Hoteliers can expect to pay between €50 and €120 per month for a single property.
What to expect when implementing a Rate Shopping & Market Intelligence Tool?
The implementation generally takes up to 2 days until a hotelier can do his first analysis. Suppliers will then provide training sessions or tutorial videos enabling hotels to quickly understand the tool and customise it to their needs.
