If you use Booking.com’s free rate-shopping tool RateIntelligence, you’ve probably already heard the news that, come 30th November this year, it will be discontinued.
NB: This is an article from Fornova
Booking.com recently made the decision to concentrate efforts on their “core business line”, leaving several of their BookingSuite products for dust. This move is likely to affect thousands of hoteliers who relied on RateIntelligence to set competitive rates for their rooms, and to provide forecast reports for up to a year in the future.
What were the strengths of RateIntelligence?
The most obvious benefit of RateIntelligence was that users could compare prices for free. Although you could pay for add-on features, the free version was still very popular with its comprehensive reports and demand forecasts.
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Other pros included:
● Showing the cheapest available room in your compset
● Revealing median price of your competitors’ rooms
● Breaking down competitors’ information by room type
● Daily notification emails about your prices and where you placed within your compset
● Ease of use
RateIntelligence wasn’t, however, completely without its flaws…
What were RateIntelligence’s weaknesses?
RateIntelligence was, essentially, just a reactive pricing tool. It encouraged users to emulate what those in their compset were doing. While it is important to check that you’re keeping up with the competition, it’s also vital to be proactive with your strategy and allow yourself to pull ahead of the game where possible.
When RateIntelligence sent reports through to its users, it showed if the competition had changed their prices – but it did so without providing context. The tool didn’t provide a market overview either, giving its users just a small slice of information without an understanding of the bigger industry trends. Providing the whole picture is arguably one of the most vital purposes of a rate shopper, allowing users to make informed decisions about their room rates.
Which essential features should your new rate shopper have?
There are plenty of features you need from your new rate shopper, including the benefits offered by RateIntelligence which we outlined above. As well as being easy to navigate with in-depth information about your compset’s rates, you should also be seeking a rate shopper with these five features:
● Uses customised point of sale (POS) to track rates as they are seen by travellers accessing the internet from different countries
● Checks competitive visibility across OTAs and Google
● Tracks Booking Basic rates
● Enables cluster/region/chain management
● Compares like for like room rates with advanced data
Time to upgrade to enterprise-grade rate shopping?
If you currently rely on RateIntelligence to help you price your rooms competitively, you’re going to be in the market for a new solution now.
Our enterprise grade rate shopper is FornovaCI (Competitive Intelligence) which is an essential tool for both larger chains and independent hotels alike.
FornovaCI offers the benefits previously included in Booking.com’s RateIntelligence, ensuring that you’re not missing any features you previously had, while offering 24/7 customer success team support. FornovaCI also encompasses the five essential rate-shopping features we discussed previously, helping you to grow your market share and boost visibility.
