Hotels - Pricing Customizations
PriceLabs offers a diverse set of impactful customizations for hotels, empowering them to stay in control at all times. We recommend starting with the customizations available in Smart Presets, and then exploring advanced options as needed.
Smart Presets
Smart Presets enable users to quickly configure essential hotel-specific settings, providing a strong foundation for fine-tuning price recommendations. The following customizations are available within Smart Presets:
- Seasonality Factor Sensitivity
- Demand factor sensitivity
- Customize Pricing Data Source
- Hotel Comp Sets
- Portfolio Occupancy Based Adjustment
- Custom seasonal profile
- Day of Week Pricing Adjustments
Steps to access Smart Presets
- Navigate to any Customization Level (Account, Group, or Listing level).
- Click on the Smart Presets tab and Select Hotel under Property Type to view the recommended customizations based on your selected preferences.
- Hover over the info button to see additional details on how to use the suggested customizations.
Here are some essential customizations for hotel:
Seasonality
Seasonality refers to changes in demand throughout the year, depending on the season or time of the year.
We recommend setting this to 'Conservative', as it gently adjusts prices during both high and low seasons. If you want more control over seasonal pricing, select 'No Seasonality' and create your own custom seasonal profile.
This allows a hotel to better cater to its market and target guests based on the season or time of year. For example, a beach resort experiences higher price fluctuations during peak vacation seasons, while a city business hotel may see more stable prices throughout the year.
Demand Factor Sensitivity
Demand Factor Sensitivity is how much changes in demand affect your prices. This setting allows you to control how much variation you want in your prices for major holidays and events.
We recommend setting this based on your preferred approach to responding to demand dates. Choose "Conservative" to secure earlier bookings at stable prices, "Recommended" to target higher rates closer to high-demand dates, or "Aggressive" to push for peak pricing during the busiest periods.
This helps optimize pricing based on market demand and its fluctuations for specific dates, including holidays, events, and day-of-week patterns.
- Customize Hotel Weights
- Select the data source for pricing recommendations: short-term rental data, hotel data, or a mix of both. For hotels, we suggest using 'Fully Hotels' or 'Mostly Hotels.
- This setting tailors pricing recommendations to your business model and competitive landscape. For instance, a hotel may rely solely on hotel data or benefit from a combination of short-term rental and hotel data to determine pricing.
- Customize Hotel Comp Set
- We suggest keeping it at the default 'PriceLabs Default'. If you have specific comp set in mind you can switch to 'Selected in Hotel Rate Shopper tab' option, and use 'Hotel Rate Shopper' tab to select your competitors. Make sure you have at least 5 hotels in the comp set.
- This set of hotels partially influences the price recommendations for this room type.
Custom seasonal profile
Custom Seasonal Profiles offer an additional layer of flexibility by allowing you to set different minimum, base, and maximum prices.
We recommend carefully setting up the min/base/max prices and minimum stay requirements based on your hotel’s unique seasonal patterns.
By creating custom seasonal profiles, you can precisely adjust your pricing to reflect peak and off-peak periods. This allows you to capitalize on high-demand seasons, offering higher rates during popular times, while maintaining competitive pricing during slower periods.
Last Minute Prices
By default, we apply last minute discounts based on what is seen on your market. Since hotels don’t usually gradually decrease rates as the date approaches, we recommend you to select the “No last minute adjustment”.
Far-out premium
By default, we apply a Far-out premium, which increases the daily rates for bookings far in advance. However, this is usually not how hotels are. So, similar to the Last Minute Prices, we recommend you to select the “No Far-out premium” to ensure that your rates are not affected by whether the booking comes at the last minute or advance.
If this option is not available for your room types, please feel free to reach out to us at support@pricelabs.co so we can enable it for you.
Orphan Day Prices
By default, we apply orphan day, which will drop prices by 20% for gaps of 1 or 2 nights in your calendar. As a hotel, you are likely to work with shorter stays and won’t want this automatic rate drop. In such a case, you can remove this discount by setting “No orphan Day adjustment” for your Orphan Day Prices.
Occupancy Based Adjustment and Portfolio Occupancy Based Adjustment
Both these customizations use your room type’s occupancy to determine if we will add a discount or premium to your daily rates. The difference is that Occupancy Based Adjustment uses the occupancy of the specific room type only, while the Portfolio Occupancy Based Adjustments accounts for an entire group ofroom type’s occupancy and applies the same discount to all the room types on the group.
Occupancy Based Adjustment
By default, we apply a default Occupancy Based Adjustment to your room types. However, for hotels, you are likely to want to optimize your prices based on the hotel’s overall occupancy, or maybe based on specific groups such as “beachfront room types” or “mountain view room types”, not based on individual rooms.
So, we recommend that you set your Occupancy Based Adjustment to “No Occupancy Based Adjustment” and then use Portfolio Occupancy Based Adjustments instead.
Portfolio Occupancy Based Adjustment
Portfolio Occupancy Based Adjustment is what you can set if you want your prices to be adjusted based on account, groups, or individual room type level.
PriceLabs offers pre-filled pricing profiles based on occupancy levels and booking window ranges, so we recommend selecting your preferred option. For more control over price adjustments, choose ‘Custom’ to create your own profile.
This setting optimizes the hotel's pricing strategy by adjusting rates based on a room type’s occupancy level and booking window. Additionally, it can also be applied at the 'Group' level if you prefer to optimize pricing based on the combined occupancy levels of similar room types. Our system will calculate the occupancy percentage of all the room types in the group, then apply the same adjustments for each room type in the group. This way, all rooms of the same category will have the same occupancy based adjustment.
Day of Week Pricing Adjustment
This option allows you to set percentage adjustments on certain days of the week. While we already apply factors such as demand to your rates so that demand days are likely to get higher prices, we understand that you may have your own preference in terms of pricing for specific days of the week. In this case, you can set up Day of Week Pricing Adjustment.
Implement nuanced day-of-week pricing to align with your hotel's unique booking patterns.
Hotels often experience consistent demand trends based on the day of the week. For instance, business hotels typically see higher occupancy on weekdays due to corporate travelers, while resort hotels tend to peak on weekends with leisure guests.
Rounding
It is common in hotels to set their rates in a more uniform way, such as all of the prices ending in 0 and 5 or 4 and 9 (e.g., $400, $1015, or $1499). If you prefer prices ending in specific numbers, you can indicate your preference in the Advanced Customizations.
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