Features Of A Hotel Rate Shopping Tool

15 Must-Look-For Features in A Hotel Rate Shopperb

A suitable pricing strategy is something that every hotelier thrives to achieve to maximize their profit and improve their revenue management. For this reason, it is always better to use the best hotel rate shopper tools for your business that help you set an effective price bottom line.

A great rate shopping tool can help you get access and leverage over your competitors and provide you with multiple opportunities to improve your business operations. With numerous benefits and pros, rate shoppers have become one of the most important tools for the hospitality industry.

It provides quality data for actionable insights and eventually helps you boost your performance. Thus, to help you choose a suitable hotel rate shopper, we have created a list of 15 must-have features in a hotel rate shopper that you should always check before saying yes to it.   

15 Must-Look-For Features in A Hotel Rate Shopper

If you are planning to get a hotel rate intelligence tool for your business, you must check out the benefits of hotel rate shopping tools and 15 must-look-for features in a hotel rate shopper mentioned below-

1. Accurate Live Data

What is a piece of information if not provided on time with accuracy? This is one of the most advanced features of this software that is worth investing in. The price intelligence tools for hotels provide accurate live data so that you can access your competitor’s pricing in real-time.

2. Integration

Integration of multiple business functions such as revenue management, room availability, bookings, and much more helps the hotel to save up on precious time. This is easily done using a suitable tool. 

Check Out The Best Hotel Revenue Management Tools From Here.

3. Hotel Price Tracking

one of the most important features of a hotel rate shopper tool is the ability to track hotel prices. It includes monitoring real-time hotel industry pricing trends, and other business practices. Keeping up a check on industry trends and competitors is a must to stay one step ahead and attract customers. Stay updated with important news and information. 

4. Room Mapping

The Room Mapping feature allows you to list and maintain the availability of rooms on the portal at a certain price. You can manage the pricing and offers and deals according to the timing and use it to earn profits and take up bookings from the clients. If you are still not convinced why room mapping is important for your hotel business, check out the impact of poor room mapping.

5. Demand Forecasting

Demand forecasting in the tool will help you to understand the current industry trends and patterns so that you can accordingly modify your business strategy. By giving you a brief on local events, weather, and other demand drivers, you can use real-time information to optimize your plans and earn the best possible returns.

Hotels, just like any other retailer would like to know more about how small or large the demand will be. This feature helps in forecasting the same by analyzing multiple factors simultaneously.

6. Hotel Price Comparison

A great feature that the hotel rate shopper tool provides you is an in-depth competitive analysis and keeps a track of the pricing strategy of your competitors. Hotel price comparison is equally important to set a suitable pricing strategy for your own business so that you maintain a balance between your profit and expected pricing by the customers.

For better hotel price positioning than your competitors, you can set your dynamic pricing strategy to attract more guests. One such rate shopping tool that provides hotel comparison data is Hotel Pricing API from Makcorps.

Hotel Rate Comparison API

7. Rate Parity Monitoring

Hotel Rate parity monitoring helps you to control your distribution costs and check on different OTA platforms to identify the undercutting of your prices. This way you can quickly decide on a course of action and maintain a unified price throughout the different channels.

It is important to maintain your rate parity so that your customers don’t lose their trust in your brand. With uniform pricing, you will be able to attract bookings from multiple platforms while avoiding any confusion and hazards.

8. Flexible Comp Set

To get the best out of your rate shopper tool, you must ensure that it has flexible comp sets for your hotel that can easily compare different variables. You can create benefits for your property through different comp sets depending on the season, proximity, competitor properties, and much more. 

Based on competitor’s data analysis for your hotel, you can further easily optimize your business operations to generate results.

9. Great Customer Support

A must-have feature in any rate shopper tool is great customer support. Fast and reliable customer support is useful to resolve and address your issues simultaneously so that you can spend more of your time growing. Choose a tool provider with 24/7 support means and someone who offers their customer support with flexibility and as per your requirement.  

10. Easy Access

There’s no point in getting a hotel business intelligence tool like rate shopper if you can’t use it when you need it. Thus, easy and flexible access is an important feature that must be looked for in your rate shopper.

Also, ensure that it offers multiple logins to improve its access with your team members for a smooth process of operations.

11. Source Market Accuracy

The tool that you are counting upon must-have source market accuracy. Look out for software that allows you to take rates from different domains of the same channel to provide an accurate analysis of the rates around the globe.

12. Provides Rate Details

It is important for hoteliers to have access to detailed insights into the rates they dig up using their rate-shopping tools. It is important to catch the granular details of the pricing to understand the factors contributing to the business’s growth.

For instance, many hotels offer extras on breakfast, in-room wifi, and much more to drive business to higher rates. Thus, for a fair comparison, it is crucial to take note of these factors.

13. Freshness of Data

There are many tools that provide you with periodic reports rather than fresh information about the market. But the prices displayed need to be recent to be relevant and to create opportunities for the business. The freshness of hotel prices dataset is thus another important feature that you should check before saying yes to the tool.

14. Events Databases

Rates of hotels can usually fluctuate on the basis of multiple factors like timing, trends, holidays, competition, and events. Thus, using this tool with an event database feature will help you to leverage your opportunities in a better manner.

Also, you will be able to predict periods of high demand to maximize your revenue generation as much as possible.

15. Historic and Current Price Evolution

Keeping an eye on both historical price data and current price trends will help you to understand the price evolution in your market in a better way. Through that, you can easily predict your future opportunities and accordingly set your strategies to grow your business in an upscale manner.

Conclusion

With such a fast-paced technology world and emerging customer needs, it is important for hoteliers to use business intelligence tools to adapt to the changing requirements. If you are one such business thriving to mark its place above in the hotel industry, you must get yourself tools like hotel rate shoppers to outperform your competitors.

We hope that all the features in a hotel rate shopper tool mentioned in the article will help you to choose your suitable rate intelligence tool efficiently.

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