What you need to know about hotel rate shopper tools

One of the Lego pieces necessary in an effective revenue management strategy is staying on top of your competitors’ actions. Insert – hotel rate shopper tool. 

Let’s discover what this tool can do for your property.

What is a hotel rate shopper?

Hotel rate shopper tools analyze your competitive set to show you what your competitors are doing and how your hotel fits in.

One of the daily tasks of revenue managers is lurking at the hotel’s compset and knowing what is happening with their pricing. That’s how they can learn to understand the hotel’s position on the market and how to optimize prices to stay competitive. As you can imagine this job can be repetitive and take more hours than predicted as you need to fit in each rate to the room types and know what components influence the price. 

Hotel rate shopper tools scan different data points to deliver hoteliers a clear benchmarking view in the form of charts and graphs. Therefore hoteliers use these tools to automate benchmarking process which results in making informed pricing decisions.

Benefits of using rate shopper 

Manual tracking of what your competitors are doing is quite time-consuming. What’s more – let’s not forget that there’s time for analysis and making decisions once you have all this information. 

So, here are five key benefits of using rate shopper in hotel:

1. Save time
2. It speeds up the comparison process
3. It saves you from missing important information
4. You always see the updated data – sometimes rates change multiple times during the day. Consequently, to make the right decisions on your room prices, you need updated information.
5. Understand your competitive position in the marketplace – this lets you be a leader instead of blindly following what others are doing.

Key features of rate shopping tool

Just as the market is growing in alike tools like PMS, CM, or RMS so too are Competitor’s Rate Scanner tools appearing on the stage.

That’s why one way to choose the right fit for your property is to check if it includes these key features:

1. Real-time data
2. Flexible compset (you can create different groups of competitors based on, for example, seasonality)
3. Monitoring competition
4. Access from the computer and mobile phone

Finally, Pricepoint offers a competitor rate scanner that lets you compare and understand your competitive position in the marketplace. You can start with a 30-days free trial to see how it will help you grow revenues.

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