What is Rate Intelligence and How to Supercharge Your Pricing Strategy?

Consumers worldwide are becoming increasingly price-sensitive, and businesses are investing more time in the art of pricing. Your pricing strategy determines your value, revenue, and it determines whether or not you can reach your goals. 

In a competitive market, many properties closely monitor their competitors in the same or similar markets to create their pricing strategy. This brings the need for rate intelligence products in the hospitality industry, as it allows businesses to track their own and competitors’ pricing data instantly.

In this blog, we will go into detail on how rate intelligence can bring you an immense advantage when it comes to creating your pricing strategy. 

What is a pricing strategy?

Your revenue as a property is directly influenced by your pricing strategy. A pricing strategy is your plan in the way of maximizing your revenue per room, which is also one of the most crucial points of operating a property. 

Your pricing is not set in stone; it can change depending on the seasons, competition, guest reviews, and many other factors. As you create your strategy, the most important thing you must consider is data, and that is where the rate intelligence products become essential.

What is hotel rate intelligence?

Rate intelligence tools are software products that help businesses and properties analyze market pricing trends by showing competitor rates and hotel pricing trends in general. Hotel rate intelligence tools provide data and help revenue managers make pricing decisions accordingly.

This data can be used to create the maximum revenue per room and avoid doing the opposite, which is underselling the rooms. Hotel rate intelligence, also known as pricing intelligence, is essential in optimizing pricing strategies in a competitive market.

Why is it important to use rate intelligence products?

As a rule of thumb, intelligence products offer one of the best returns on investment in hospitality. Beating the competition needs to be one step ahead; therefore, intelligence products provide the required information to make your strategic and tactical moves with the optimum results. 

Providing crucial information to analyze the market and rate intelligence products in the hospitality industry is one of the must-have instruments of success in the field. 

Rate intelligence can provide you:

• Access to real-time prices of competing properties
• Consistency across all sales channels 
• Reliable data
• AI-powered pricing

What are the key elements of hotel rate intelligence?

The key elements of a hotel rate intelligence tool consist of rate parity, real-time data, and data reporting. At its core, these 3 elements are combined to help you create the most beneficial pricing strategy. 

Rate parity: 

As we have become accustomed to a multi-channel reservation infrastructure, rate parity is crucial for a business to succeed. Hotel rate intelligence tools resolve the rate parity issues by detecting rate changes and help businesses adjust the pricing accordingly. By preventing these irregularities, you can protect your brand revenue.

Real-time data: 

Hotel rate intelligence tools provide real-time data for the sake of accuracy, and thus properties can optimize their revenue by offering the right price at the right time. A strong R&D background and a vast network of OTAs and metasearch channels are prerequisites for being accurate and agile. 

Data reporting: 

Last but not least, data visualization is critical for understanding the data and reporting to the relevant people in a business operation. A successful hotel rate intelligence tool must have various reporting capabilities, including occupancy rates, channel performance, and weekly reports. 

The occupancy rate report is created using ADR (Average Daily Rate), RevPAR (Revenue Per Available Room), and Occupancy Rate data. The gathered data should be private and secure to prevent any undesired results. 

Channel performance reports are gathered by tracing several properties’ rates on a specific online channel. This enables a business owner to compare a property’s performance on a certain channel.

Channel-based and weekly reports are the most common types of reporting timeframes. Therefore, Channel-based and weekly price changes can be observed through these reports. 

What do hotel rate intelligence tools offer?

Apart from the core elements, there are several features a business owner should be looking for in a hotel rate intelligence tool. 

Hotel rate intelligence tools provide crucial data and insights to optimize pricing. They monitor competitor rates in real-time across channels, ensuring rate parity and identifying opportunities. Powerful analytics tap into trends to forecast demand and yield maximum revenue. They offer customized recommendations based on your unique market position.  

A successful rate intelligence tool and its reports must have mobile compatibility. As businesses are becoming more remote and on the go, mobile compatibility is gaining significant importance in making business decisions instantly. 

Another key feature is collecting live updates and information through a robust technology infrastructure. As it is known, achieving rate parity is vital for getting the best results out of a rate intelligence tool, and it can only be achieved with live updates and accurate information collection.

Apart from rates and occupancy rates, an above-and-beyond hotel rate intelligence tool can offer online reputation analysis by tracking and comparing property ratings on various platforms. 

Meet Competition Analysis:

HotelRunner offers the perfect rate and pricing intelligence solution: Competition Analysis. Competition Analysis gives you everything you need to monitor your market, compare your rates against competitors, and create smarter pricing strategies with minimal effort.

With real-time access to competitors’ prices across multiple online travel agencies, you can instantly adapt your rates, maintain flawless rate parity, and capture demand before the competition does. Comprehensive channel, weekly, and occupancy rate reports give you a complete view of market trends, helping you position your property strategically and profitably.

Stay ahead of the competition. Try HotelRunner Competition Analysis today!