Thermae Palace: winning back time and calm in a highly dynamic coastal market

REVENUE MANAGEMENT

When your hotel sits right on the seafront, the weather can rewrite your pickup overnight. For Thermae Palace in Ostend, Belgium, manual pricing meant long days, constant vigilance, and a lot of pressure on one person. With RoomPriceGenie, they turned that pressure into a repeatable, shareable revenue process.

Why it matters: Independent hotels in fast-moving, weather-dependent markets often rely on one experienced leader to “hold” all pricing decisions in their head. That works—until it doesn’t. A revenue management solution that reacts as fast as the market, but is easy enough to hand over to the team, protects both revenue and sanity.

Thermae Palace is a historic 1930s seafront hotel in Ostend, Belgium, with 136 rooms, large multifunctional event spaces and a brasserie that attracts mainly local guests and day visitors. It combines a protected, heritage building and a very modern guest expectation: reliable Wi-Fi, contemporary in-room features and sharp, dynamic pricing. Before RoomPriceGenie, managing prices was a fully manual process owned by the hotel director, Ken. Every day, every rate was set by hand based on his 20+ years of experience in the market. This worked well for revenue, but it was time-consuming, stressful and hard to hand over, especially in a market driven by weather, last-minute bookings and cancellations. RoomPriceGenie now provides Thermae Palace with dynamic, demand-based pricing that reacts quickly to changes in occupancy and market behaviour. The team checks the system twice a day, makes light manual adjustments when specific local knowledge (like a sudden heatwave) matters, and otherwise lets it run. Crucially, a colleague with far fewer years of revenue experience can now manage pricing and still achieve results comparable to Ken’s, with much less daily effort.

Top 3 Core Objectives: Thermae Palace wanted to reduce the daily burden and risk of manual pricing, stay competitive in a highly weather-sensitive market, and make revenue management easier to share across the team, without sacrificing results.

Reduce pricing workload: Move away from one person spending hours each day on manual rate decisions. Free up leadership time by letting a system handle day-to-day pricing, while keeping oversight simple.
Protect peak revenue: Make sure the hotel captures full value on high-demand days, especially at the coast where weather can trigger sudden waves of last-minute bookings. Use a system that is willing to price higher than a human might dare, without harming guest satisfaction.
Share revenue expertise: Make revenue management less dependent on one expert by giving colleagues a tool they can confidently use. Ensure that someone with less experience can still deliver strong results, supported by clear recommendations and easy controls.

Innovators Mentioned

RoomPriceGenie

Ken Debusschere

Hotel manager

Thermae Palace Hotel

"The time savings and the mental calm are enormous. We easily save two hours a day, and the pressure of every single price decision no longer sits on one person."

Ken Debusschere

Hotel manager

👍 Hotel manager Ken Debusschere said that they benefited with time, peace of mind and shared responsibility:

"The time savings and the mental calm are enormous. We easily save two hours a day, and the pressure of every single price decision no longer sits on one person."

⚖️ The selection process: During their research process, Ken Debusschere evaluated RoomPriceGenie's product differentiators, customer support, and holistic value as a strategic partner and ultimately decided that RoomPriceGenie was the best fit solution:

Hotel manager Ken Debusschere said, about their decision: "The system dares to go 15–20% higher than the prices I would have set myself, and those rooms still sell without unhappy guests. That’s where we really feel the difference on peak days."

📈 The results: Thermae Palace regained valuable hours each day, reduced stress and dependency on one person, and saw stronger performance on sold-out days, while maintaining guest satisfaction at higher rates.

Approx. 2 hours saved per day on pricing tasks, allowing the director to focus on wider strategy and operations instead of daily rate changes.
On fully sold-out days, revenue is around 5–7% higher than before, as the system confidently pushes rates beyond previous manual ceilings when demand allows.
RoomPriceGenie enables a colleague with 20 years less revenue experience to manage pricing with confidence, achieving similar results with far less stress and a simple twice-daily check-in.