I like to say that you have as many different competitive sets as you have clients. Most hotels think of their few comp sets, usually one to three predefined lists of hotels. I was so proud when I joined Rate Yield because we can set any number of competitive sets for different seasons and we can assign a level of importance to each hotel differently by day of week. Then, in speaking with a variety of different clients with a variety of different problems that required novel solutions, I became overjoyed to work at Rate Yield, where we love coming up with solutions to complex issues.
One of the things that makes Rate Yield unique is our ability to customize our offering to respond to each hotels needs and one of my favourite ways to do this is by creating multiple instances for the same hotel. Below are some of the reasons why we utilize multiple instances and how they can benefit our clients.
Your Room Types are not standard
Within Rate Yield you can manage differentials for different room types very easily. This can be done in dollar value or percentage values and these differentials can vary by season or week day. The vast majority of our clients find our room type module to respond to their needs and then some! But what if your rooms are not typical hotel rooms?
Let’s say you have an aparthotel with some studios that compete with standard hotels and some two-bedroom apartments that compete with all-suite properties and Airbnb. With Rate Yield, you could have an instance for your studio rooms and another for your larger units to allow you to shop the correct competitors, set the proper minimum thresholds, and address the difference in booking windows.
Similarly, if you have some rooms with shared bathrooms and others that are self-enclosed, but maintaining static room type differentials and lowering the rooms with shared bathrooms as a function of the typical self-enclosed hotel room, you are missing out on any market dynamics that play out for youth hostels and B&Bs.
Having the possibility to create different strategies for the different offerings your hotel has on the menu will ultimately allow your entire establishment to benefit from higher returns.
You want to manage your channels differently
Because Rate Yield has proprietary shopping technology, we are able to shop major OTAs, Airbnb and the majority of brand.com booking engines. As such, we often entertain discussions about which is best to shop and base strategies off of. In most cases we recommend strategizing based off of your largest contributing web channel. If that is OTAs, we will shop your competitors on OTAs rather than brand.com, for example.
What if you have special rates for people who book directly through your website? Directly within Rate Yield we can manage a secondary rate plan dynamically from the primary. That means rather than setting a link between the rate plans in your PMS that remain the same at all times, you could adjust the differential directly in Rate Yield, setting it significantly higher to slow a channel or lower if you need to allow in more demand.
But what if your entire market is managing their direct rates and OTA rates completely independently of each other? Rate Yield can create for you a separate instance. We can use one to shop brand.com and the other to shop OTAs and we can update the appropriate rate plans from each instance.
You have one PMS environment managing multiple physical properties
Just because it’s easier to manage all of your physical properties in one PMS doesn’t mean it makes sense to manage the rates together. In Rate Yield we encourage our clients to set individual strategies for different hotels by using multiple instances, all flowing into the same PMS environment.
Whatever the reason may be, the team at Rate Yield is happy and eager to think outside the box to customize the platform so you build your rate strategy with the right foundations. We don’t believe in a one size fits all or even a one size fits most approach. So schedule a demo with us today to see how we can make our system work for you!
