NB: This is an article by nSight
nSight, the leader in online consumer shopping intelligence for hotels and destinations, has added twenty new hotel clients in New York City. Both brand and independent hotels are battling rate and margin pressure based on slowed international travel, the growth of alternative accommodations like Airbnb, and increasing supply growth, particularly in boutique and limited mid-service hotels. By using forward-looking shopping data to make smarter revenue strategy and targeting decisions, NYC hotels apply dynamic pricing to grow direct bookings and RevPAR.
Since early 2015, New York City hotels have posted below average RevPAR growth. Implementation of predictive data from nSight reflects the industry’s move from traditional “inward looking” tools to a more outward-focused, integrated revenue and marketing strategy solutions.
“nSight does more than tell us competitor room rates,” explained Grant Schilling, Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development at the Distrik Hotel Group, featuring the garment district’s first boutique hotel. “nSight gives us the ability to see guest demand across the web and how our rate impacts consumer behavior. Now, we have real data that shows us when and what consumers we can target to boost direct bookings and optimize rate. This demand-driven dynamic pricing helps us increase ADR, grow margin, and shift share from OTAs.”
Schilling also attributes nSight data for helping them target the right NYC guests in digital marketing by understanding the top source markets and demographic profiles for NYC-bound guests 30/60/90 days into the future.
New York City hoteliers’ view of forward-looking consumer demand powers a consumer-driven pricing strategy that allows them to increase profitability based on the following advantages:
- Improved forecasting: unconstrained demand beyond the hotel’s website and in-house systems shows consumer shopping peaks and valleys for future arrival dates, based on specific hotel and comp set rates.
- Optimized ADR: an integrated view of future rate and demand tells hoteliers when to hold, raise or lower rates based on consumer behavior.
- Increased certainty: actual consumer demand for future travel dates gives a level of certainty in uncertain situations.
“We’ve used a lot of data products and forecasting tools, but they don’t do for us what nSight does,” said, Louise Gallagher, Director of Revenue Management for Hotel Pennsylvania, a 1700+-room institution for transient leisure visitors to New York. “nSight shows us the consumer behavior response to our rates compared to our competitors. We can make real-time changes that have a positive revenue impact for the week, the month and the quarter. Since signing on this month, we’re just learning the power nSight gives us in the highly competitive New York market.”
Featured New York City hotels using nSight travel intelligence solutions include:
- Econo Lodge Times Square
- Hotel Hugo
- Hotel Pennsylvania
- INNSIDE New York NoMad
- Martha Washington Hotel (soon to be The Redbury New York)
- The Distrikt Hotel
- The Paul
- The Time New York
- Wyndham Garden Chinatown
- Wyndham New Yorker
“New York City hotels are embracing a critical industry shift,” said Rich Maradik, nSight Founder. “Hotels need to act differently in this new multi-faceted competitive environment and that means not just dropping rate to win market share. That old approach is a fast track to declining profitability. New York hotels are innovating how they price and market because they have to. Doing things the same way is not producing RevPAR growth — ownership groups, in particular, are seeking a new path to profit growth in one of the world’s premier destinations.”
