Check out the first article in this series, Rate Management Today, Part 1: The Elusive BAR to learn why assessing and setting your best available rate is important. Then read on to see how SkyTouch can make it easy.
Last time, we discussed the toughest part of hotel management today—setting your BAR—with property advocate, Andy, and programmer and analyst, Chuck. Today, Chuck takes us deeper into how the SkyTouch Technology Hotel OS® is helping hotel owners and revenue managers optimize their BAR in real time to keep ahead of their competition.
Chuck started programming for the hospitality industry in the 1970s, when setting rates worked a little differently than it does today. “Back when I started in the business, you published your rates once a year, like in an AAA book,” Chuck says. That number would be the base rate, from which customers could gauge what your hotel would charge. Chuck says this annual rate is still the number programmers and hoteliers work from, thinking, ‘This time last year, we did this. We should be able to hit those same numbers. If we’re not hitting our numbers, what is keeping us from doing that?’
What’s different today is the pace of change, the need to constantly monitor your and your competition’s rate and be agile enough to adjust prices daily—even hourly—to satisfy consumer demand for real-time value. To enable hotels to act fast and meet this demand, the SkyTouch Hotel OS® rate structure is tiered. “For a season, you can set 3-6 tiers of rates,” Chuck explains, “which you can select from day-to-day.” Not only is rate-setting made easy, the SkyTouch Hotel OS® rate management is revolutionizing rate-monitoring.
“We look at where a property should be, based on statistics, and set alerts automatically. The alert capability is very important,” Chuck adds. This capability keeps revenue managers free from analyzing numbers themselves. “All they have to do is look at the data,” Chuck explains. “As soon as he logs in to the hotel OS, the first page that comes up is the alert page. It’s always on the forefront of their minds as rate managers, so we put it at the forefront of our SkyTouch interface.” Combine the alert system with tiered rates, and the SkyTouch Hotel OS® “gives the owner/operator an easy way to move from one rate level to another, with a few key strokes.”
And Chuck isn’t stopping there. “My latest project is rate optimization,” he adds. “We’re working with a third party interface that we’re integrating into the SkyTouch® process to project what the rate should be that day. With this third party package, they’re able to say, ‘If you raise your rate by $5, we project that you will still hit your 95% occupancy, but your additional revenue based on where you are now will pull in another $500.’ This $500 is going directly to your bottom line.
“We make the job you have to do easier so you can focus more on your day-to-day business. Mom-and-pops don’t have to have a sophisticated rates manager if they can trust in the software. You can do more with less, with SkyTouch.”
