What is hotel price monitoring?
Hotel price monitoring is a vital strategy for accommodation businesses which involves tracking room prices in the local market, including your own. Some properties will also monitor the prices of hotels with similar profiles in other destinations.
Monitoring hotel prices is a data-led approach that can be performed daily to ensure your property is staying competitive and maximising revenue from bookings.
In this blog, we’ll give you a complete overview of hotel price monitoring, including the tools that make it easy to stay on top of.
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Why is hotel price tracking important?
Hotel price tracking is important because it underpins one of the most essential parts of your business – your pricing strategy.
The way you price your accommodation will directly affect the decisions of travellers when they are choosing a property to stay at. If you set prices much higher than your competitors, guests will doubt they are getting value for money. If you set prices much lower than your competitors, guests may think you lack quality.
Implementing price tracking at your hotel will ensure you are always aware of where the sweet spot will be when setting your rates – so you can attract the maximum number of guests and hit your revenue targets. Tracking hotel prices is all about making informed strategic decisions that give you the best chance of a positive outcome.
Pricing monitoring benefits for your hotel
Pricing monitoring offers a range of benefits for your small hotel business, including:
Understanding your local market in more detail
The modern accommodation landscape is constantly changing, which means prices are always changing too as influences such as seasonality, events, weather, and traveller trends take effect. Monitoring this will mean you won’t be caught off-guard.
Gaining access to accurate, real-time, data
When done properly, the data you gain from price tracking will be timely, meaning you can actually make use of the information in a meaningful way.
Making smarter pricing decisions that deliver better revenue results
The more you know, the better plans you will make, and the better your outcomes will be. With a clear understanding of where you stand in the local market, you can ensure your price and value is always appealing to the guests you want to attract.
Being more agile and able to adapt quickly to market changes
When you notice a shift in the market, you can immediately get on the front foot to make strategic adjustments and capitalise on revenue opportunities.
Having greater clarity on when and how to adjust your strategies
Since you won’t have to rely on guesswork or hunches, the timing and effectiveness of your decision making will be greatly improved. Instead of being left behind by your competitors, you’ll be leading from the front.
With improved pricing decisions, you might also have more money and resources to invest in valuable projects and improvements for your business. In turn, this will allow you to attract even more guests and income than before.
How to track hotel prices
Of course, one way to track hotel prices is to scour the websites of competitors and third-party booking channels manually and record this data yourself.
However, if you want to keep an eye on a number of competitors, across a number of locations as well as your own rates in the places you sell your rooms, it quickly becomes time-consuming and tiresome.
Luckily, the digital age has introduced a number of tools and solutions that can do this for you, much faster and more accurately.
The key is to find a tool that works for you and caters to the needs of a small-scale accommodation business.
Using a hotel price tracker
Using a hotel price tracker is certainly the best way to implement price monitoring at your hotel.
So, what qualities should you look for in a solution and how do you use it?
Some of the most important aspects of a price tracker are that it:
- Delivers real-time data
- Allows you to track local competitors
- Gives you visibility over your own rate
- Produces clear, actionable, insights
- Creates easy-to-understand performance reports
- Has everything in one convenient interface
With these features you can use a price tracker to perform daily price checks, set up price alerts, adjust your pricing strategy, ensure you maintain parity over your own rate, and access key performance reports that you can use to make improvements.
Thankfully, you can find all of the above with Little Hotelier, an all-in-one solution designed specifically for small accommodation businesses.
Make tracking hotel prices easy with Little Hotelier’s simple software
Little Hotelier not only makes running a small accommodation business easier and more enjoyable, but it allows small businesses to remain competitive with larger hotels by maximising efficiency and revenue.
One of the many useful features of Little Hotelier is its business intelligence tool, which allows your property to track local market prices, keep an eye on your own rate across multiple sites, see key performance metrics, and make smarter decisions.
But that’s not all you get. You’ll also enjoy:
- Channel management: Automate your inventory management by selling on as many booking sites as you want at the same time, without the risk of double-bookings or the time crunch of manual updates.
- Direct bookings: Use the online booking engine to easily take bookings and payments on your own website, via social media, and via metasearch sites such as Google.
- Mobile app: Manage your reservations from anywhere, anytime, in the palm of your hand with a fully functional mobile app.
Little Hotelier is the perfect tool for small operators who want to live a relaxed lifestyle while also running a successful business!
By Dean Elphick
Dean is the Senior Content Marketing Specialist of Little Hotelier, the all-in-one software solution purpose-built to make the lives of small accommodation providers easier. Dean has made writing and creating content his passion for the entirety of his professional life, which includes more than six years at Little Hotelier. Through content, Dean aims to provide education, inspiration, assistance, and, ultimately, value for small accommodation businesses looking to improve the way they run their operations (and live their life).
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