The hospitality industry is arguably in the Golden Age of revenue management. The discipline has reached across all categories of hotels, becoming a non-negotiable line item in many hotels’ resourcing plan. Revenue managers have earned a more prominent place in the hotel hierarchy in part due to the growing capabilities of revenue management technology.

Cloud computing has accelerated the ability for hotels to analyze existing data -- such as rate changes from competitors -- with greater speed and accuracy. This is no easy feat, given the growing number of datapoints that make up the average day in the hospitality business.

The necessity for hotels to have an affordable-yet-powerful solution led to a new breed of hotel technology company, such as OTA Insight. The company offers three different tools, Parity Insight, Rate Insight, and Revenue Insight,  that help hoteliers optimize profitability.

The company built these revenue management tools to “empower smarter revenue and distribution tools” for the smallest boutiques and single-property independents to hotel management companies spread across multiple brands in multiple countries. Here's how each of those products helps you're tell optimize revenue and be its most profitable self.

Keep your rates in check with Parity Insight

In a world where 69% of travelers start their trip planning on a search engine, and thus can easily surface rate variations, rate parity is an essential component of hotel profitability. According to OTA Insight’s Annual Hotel Parity Review, independents face parity losses for 53% of tracked shops (U.S.) and 46% of tracked shops (Europe). For major chains, disparity appears in 45% of shops in the U.S. and 35% in Europe. And, as new wholesalers pop up on metasearch. seemingly overnight, it's a constant uphill battle to stay on top of shifting market dynamics.

Despite the staying power of intermediaries, there are some positive signs that rate parity is helping hotels achieve stronger direct booking results: Phocuswright recently declared that direct bookings are accelerating in the U.S. lodging market. As hotels maintain stronger control over distribution partners, guests are less likely to be enticed by law rate offered on an OTA.

OTA Insight’s Parity Insight is the end-to-end solution for hotel groups and chains to discover and solve parity issues across their portfolio. The rate shopper provides a visual interface to quickly identify potential challenges related to out-of-parity rates and opportunities based on competitors’ rates. Your dashboard (seen below) is your at-a-glance ally in fighting for your hotels rate parity.

The benefits of Parity Insight are four-fold:

• Save time. With a real-time view of your parity, you’ll know where you stand at any given moment. OTA Insight also offers automated workflows, such as updating your hotel’s rate in response to competitors. You can set it and forget it, freeing up time to focus on strategy rather than endless manual updates. 

• Regain control of your distribution. The dashboard offers a holistic view across each of your chosen distribution channels. You can monitor performance, customize your alerts, and respond immediately as appropriate. 

• Better partnerships. Transparency is an important part of building trust in your distribution partners. Your Parity Insight dashboard highlights the data you need to have effective conversations and collaborate more fruitfully -- such as drilldowns into parity issues segmented by market, brand, source, channel and price difference that can then be escalated to the account managers.

• Reduce errors. Manual tracking is prone to mistakes. Outdated caches can lead to misinformation. With Parity Insight, you’ll be focused on relevant issues based on reliable data. You can also set up workflow automation to prioritize issues, as well as help with root cause detection based on your weekly Parity Score.

Notable feature: Flexible compsets make this a flexible rate shopper. You can easily compare different variables, such a season, proximity, or aspirational competitors, and even a reverse compset -- those competitors that use your hotel of the benchmark. 

Read more OTA Insight reviews like this one.

Leverage business intelligence with Rate Insight

Smarter pricing decisions stem from a holistic understanding of the levers impacting demand. Once you can understand how these levers work together to drive (or limit) demand, then you can price your rooms more strategically -- and ideally book more profitable revenue, consistently.

As the top-rated market intelligence tool on HTR, Rate Insight provides direct access to relevant demand data in a dashboard format. With this single view, hoteliers can quickly and efficiently see all the factors impacting current and future demand. In a single view, you'll see accurate hotel market intelligence that combines pricing, demand, reputation, benchmarking, and on-the-books occupancy.

In addition to the dashboard, Rate Insight also helps you:

• Eliminate endless busy work. Even for the most skilled Excel ninja, it can take a lot of time to slice and dice competitors’ current, past, and future rates. Rate Insight does this work automatically and instantly, so you can explore across room types and length of stay without caching concerns. You can also schedule rate shops across multiple rate setups up to 365 days ahead -- another busywork buster.

• Base your decisions off reliable data. Inaccurate data leads to inaccurate decisions. Rate Insight makes it easy to customize your room type mapping so that you can reliably compare different rate types, such House public versus number rates, best flex versus lowest rate, different meal plans, and length-of-stay. This is especially helpful for revenue managers managing multiple properties that aren’t mirror copies of each other.  

• Stay on top of your market. Rate Insight pulls in a full list of leisure and corporate events, as well as online reputation, to paint a relevant, comprehensive, and up-to-date picture of your local market. This makes it super easy to compare your OTA rank with competitors, and identify areas for improvement -- such as drilling down into specific arrival dates to investigate further.

Notable feature: As an add-on to Rate Insight, hotels can live shop rates directly from multiple distribution channels. This shows hoteliers how their rates appear to potential guests in different countries. This avoids caching issues, which can lead to inaccuracies, and gives hotels a fresh perspective into rates across different points-of-sale. Geo-live shopping can be customized to key source markets in Asia, Europe, America, and the Middle East. The best part: You can click through to a live view of the meta-search websites for proof of disparity.

Read more OTA Insight reviews like this one.

Unlock your PMS data with Revenue Insight

There's so much valuable data locked in your property management system. Without a companion tool to unlock this data, it remains untapped. Your hotel will never fully benefit from its value.

Revenue Insight is the business intelligence platform that unlocks the potential of your PMS data and guides towards improved pricing and profitability. With dynamic PMS analytics, you’ll be poised to perform, using the latest guest data to inform future campaigns. The benefits extend to your team too: During meetings, you can get granular and drill down to surface the information the team needs to succeed.

One client, Highgate Hotels, enjoyed a total revenue increase of over $400,000, led primarily by leveraging revenue insights to shift business to more profitable segments. In addition to stronger revenue, clients of Revenue Insight benefit from:

• Time savings. As the platform is updated overnight, there’s no delay or wait times when exporting data from the PMS, uploading it into a spreadsheet, and then squeezing it for useful information. With an intuitive and interactive dashboard, it’s much easier to spot opportunities and maximize impact. It’s a truly dynamic platform that can be configured to any combination of indicators such as rate codes, channels, and room types.

• Easy performance monitoring. Revenue Insight converts your revenue data into business intelligence so you can act. Click on the Revenue tab and scroll, it’s all there: period-over-period comparisons between actuals and on-the-books, booking windows, pick-up trends, and your revenue KPIs.

• Better collaboration. Empower your teams with the data they need to do their jobs at the highest level. Reports can be freely shared with colleagues, so sales can monitor agency or corporate performance, distribution can monitor channel performance, and marketing can quickly spot opportunities for data-driven campaigns.

Notable feature: By analyzing your performance by rate code, length-of-stay, and segment, you'll have a much more nuanced understanding about which rates work for which segments and stay patterns. While this data exists in the PMS, seeing it in the dashboard format accelerates how quickly you can respond. 

Read more OTA Insight reviews like this one. 

Profitable revenue, consistently

The ultimate objective for all revenue management activities is to build a competitive moat of profitable revenue -- and to do this on a consistent basis. 

The consistency piece is a real struggle for hoteliers, as 51% report feeling unsure or out of control of their rate parity strategy. And, with only 60% of properties taking advantage of revenue management resources, there’s plenty of opportunities to improve profitability. For hoteliers ready to tackle parity issues, optimize rates, and improve the bottom line, revenue management software is a capable and affordable ally to get the job done!