Efficient hotel pricing strategy is a must-have for today’s hoteliers to increase their overall profitability. Hotel revenue managers should understand various aspects including distribution mix, demand forecast, competition pricing and consumers’ buying trends, etc. to manage pricing more effectively and to increase hotel profit.
NB: This is an article from BEONx, one of our Expert Partners
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Let’s analyze some of the important components to come up with the right pricing strategy to increase hotel revenue.
CUSTOMER CENTRIC REVENUE MANAGEMENT
Only those organizations that are able to put the customer at the center of their revenue management strategy, will be able to grow in an increasingly competitive environment and gain market share.
Therefore, we should talk about customer-centric and fair pricing and, for sure, we will discover the surprising secret for profitability.
HQI & FAIR PRICING
Customer-centric pricing requires the simultaneous and continuous assessment of product attributes, customer perceptions, and the circumstances of time and place by listening to customers’ actions.
Fair pricing means offering a selling price that is consistent with what a customer is willing to pay for the quality of your service, considering the alternative products on the market. This includes taking into account not only the objective quality of your property and online reputation as a reflection of customer satisfaction, but also competitor’s rates and overall quality. BEONx HQI™ is able to include this information into the algorithm to always suggest a fair price for your strategic decisions.
BEONx is willing to recommend a price that increases a lifetime value customer and reduces the cost of acquisition because they are happy customers.
To guarantee competitive positioning and operational profitability, hoteliers have to ensure that the distributor is fully aligned to its rate strategy. That is why we talk about rate integrity.
RATE INTEGRITY, A Key Way to Increase Direct Bookings
By keeping rate parity, you create trust amongst potential guests so that they are more likely to book directly and in the long run. This trust creates brand loyalty.
Rate integrity aims for the perfect balance between consistency and flexibility.
The rise of new-age channels is giving competition to OTAs and brand sites as more travelers today search on these platforms as the traveler looks for competitive deals and prices making it extremely critical for hotels to have a foolproof strategy to maintain rate parity, but most importantly, rate integrity, across all third-party partners. E.g.: Pruvo
Public prices shouldn’t be influenced by other segments. If your customer trusts you they will be more likely to come back reducing the customer acquisition cost.
ATTRIBUTE BASED SELLING
Attribute-based selling is the idea that instead of selling hotel rooms by room category, guests can instead take a ‘pick and mix’ approach to control their own purchase path.
For example, they could put together features they care for most and not purchase elements they don’t really wish to pay for – such as choosing a basic room for €50 with no breakfast included, but adding a king size bed for an extra €50 along with a sea view for another €20.
A really good example of this is Hotelverse, which redefines the purchasing experience, allowing the customer an aerial view of the hotel, giving them the opportunity to explore its facilities, choose the room that perfectly suits them, and book it.
Right now, the hotel distribution ecosystem is beginning a journey of transformation that will fundamentally change the way inventory is mapped, categorized, priced and sold. Of course, ABS is not just about better aligning customer needs. It’s about better managing the assets of a hotel to maximize their value.
To guarantee competitive positioning and operational profitability, hoteliers have to ensure that the distributor is fully aligned to its rate strategy.
Why not talk about product structure then?
PRODUCT STRUCTURE
Product structure is based on which attributes you have in your rooms that makes you charge your clients more. E.g.: refurbished room, see views, different structures, etc.
Basically, it consists in taking into account the distinguishing features of your rooms and price them separately. By pricing each room differently, according to its room features, hotels can go from selling a few different price points to selling dozens or even hundreds of different price points each day.
Additionally, this way of marketing allows the hotel to constantly change the way the room is marketed to guests. E.g.: Gauvendi
B2B PRICING
Pricing plays a strategic role in B2B. Not only does pricing affect hoteliers’ profit, but it also helps them target profitable customers and maximize sales.
MEETING & EVENTS & CORPORATE -> INTRODUCING DYNAMIC PRICING
Dynamic pricing simply means that you give your corporate clients a percentage discount of your BAR (best available rate) instead of a fixed (or seasonal) contracted rate. The corporate rates, and all other rate plans, basically adjust as yield is applied (up or down) to the pricing of the hotel.
Applying dynamic pricing for B2B, prices will need to change flexibly based on your subjective and objective assessment of a different B2B audience or group of customers.
What is the difference with a dynamic pricing strategy? It’s mainly in its intensity, timeliness and automation. With dynamic pricing, you’re not only looking at predictable things like seasonality but also history, booking behavior, competition, weather, and many other environmental factors. Although you still plan your room rates a year ahead with dynamic pricing, it serves more as a starting point than the rule. Room rates can change by the week, by the day, or even by the hour based on continually changing forecasts.
How to implement it?
Dynamic pricing is made possible thanks to data. What data are we talking about? Here are the main data pipelines that power dynamic pricing-enabled hotel booking:
- Your business KPIs (to help you clearly define the goals of dynamic pricing);
- Market pricing, supply, and demand;
- Trends in guest behavior, wants, and needs;
- Pricing of main competitors.
The most important thing to do is to pick the price intelligence engine and revenue management system that reflects your hotel’s unique needs and goals.
Let’s for example talk about Spazious, the world’s first company to offer Hotels an innovative new way of showcasing their property. This startup increases hotel revenues thanks to its immersive technology that enables on-demand event configuration.
FOOD & BEVERAGE PRICING
Considering the rigor applied to room revenue pricing decisions, it is remarkable that the approach to hotel F&B pricing is comparatively underdeveloped at most hotel properties. F&B managers typically opt for a safe-bet strategy of pricing F&B based on the average prices for similar products offered by the competition.
DynamEat as an example of the future:
- DynamEat will enable you to identify your low demand periods and address the right marketing and tactical actions to generate more volumes during those low demand days.
- Be more profitable when your restaurant has higher demand
- Dynamic Pricing and Smart Menus enable strategies to optimize the profitability of your restaurant during peak demand days.
- Optimize your Product Mix
- It is not about selling more expensive; it is about selling the most profitable items while securing the most customer satisfaction.
- Bring customers during low demand days
To sum up, any accommodation business needs a revenue management strategy to be sustainable. For any hotelier, it is critical to design revenue management strategies that adapt to current market conditions.
Revenue Management strategies in the hotel industry should focus on the guest. There is no one perfect strategy for all hotels. Each hotel must consider the pricing strategies that work best for their particular type of business and according to the analytics of data reporting.
PRICE STRATEGY SUMMARY
Pricing strategies in the hotel industry is one topic that will forever be discussed by hoteliers the world over. Continuing to use manual and fixed pricing in times of unprecedented variability in demand introduces unnecessary risk and can negatively impact long-term profitability and success for any property.
To remain competitive in the current situation, hoteliers need to set room prices proactively, according to the most recent possible data. Creating good pricing strategies is all about getting the most revenue out of each room.
Maximizing ADR and RevPAR are key to sustainable profitability while optimized pricing can help properties protect their customer base in a highly competitive market.
