Tips & Best Practices for Hospitality & Travel Professionals | RateGain Blog

There was a time when “travel accommodation” and “hotel” were virtually interchangeable. Sure, there were vacation properties, but at a smaller scale and not readily available on the major travel booking platforms. With the rise of Airbnb and other alternative accommodation platforms, this is no longer true. There is now a myriad of options available to travelers wishing to explore the world. A more appropriate term for what these new platforms offer is “alternat...

Resilience is the watchword during a sharp downturn. Companies that skillfully navigate these choppy waters will have one feature in common: they will have prepared today to build resilience tomorrow, no matter which way the economic winds blow. And sometimes, those winds blow more fiercely than others. During the Great Recession in 2008, hotels worldwide suffered double-digit drops in occupancy, RevPAR, and profit. In many cases, the drop happened in mere months...

The last few months have brought an unprecedented spate of challenges for the hotels and hospitality sector. As the COVID-19 outbreak impacted 100+ countries around the world, all non-essential travel came to a halt. Exclusive research by RateGain revealed valuable insights into how COVID-19 influenced demand, supply, and distribution. Room revenue trend is poised to witness a steep decline, reducing by 16% month-on-month starting January-February 2020. Across th...

During a crisis, communication becomes the key for businesses and individuals to survive. The impact of COVID-19 has been unprecedented, and many businesses don’t know how to keep in touch with customers. Many companies have even gone silent on social media. At the same time, there are some tourism brands are not only leveraging social media to navigate through this pandemic, but also winning hearts. Why Social Media During COVID-19? Consumer Behavior is Chan...

The sudden outbreak of the novel COVID-19, which has been recently declared as a ‘pandemic’ by the WHO, has compelled many organizations to question and rethink on their readiness and agility to combat such global crisis. During this tough time, the most important aspects for companies to address are the well-being of their employees while maintaining business continuity. The current crisis has inadvertently started off a marathon exercise in concepts like ‘Work ...

Rate disparity does not only dent your profits but also harms your hotel brand’s reputation. Maintaining rate parity across all distribution channels is, therefore, critical to your hotel chain. The complex task of achieving rate parity is all about maintaining ‘rate integrity’ by avoiding the temptation of offering dramatic discounts and, at the same time, having no justification for other guests who bought the same room for a much higher price. In the last s...

Hotel revenue managers today face myriad of challenges while devising a holistic pricing strategy, driving top-line growth, and plugging revenue leakage. Maximizing revenue has become increasingly difficult due to the proliferation of multiple distribution channels including brand sites, Online Travel Agents (OTAs), and new-age channels such as mobile apps. Revenue managers need to constantly track prices across channels to ensure they are ahead of the competition, ...

Maintaining rate parity is a consistent challenge for hotel revenue managers. In today’s hyper-digital travel industry, search engines, OTAs, and other digital platforms all promise a ‘lowest price guarantee,’ but few live up to the guest’s expectations. Inevitably, a guest finding a wide disparity in accommodation rates across channels loses ‘trust’ in the hotel and is less likely to stay loyal in the long-term. It’s no wonders that travelers are also confused a...

The hotel industry is witnessing large-scale proliferation of Online Travel Aggregators (OTA) and high-price sensitivity. Hoteliers are, thus, spending innumerable hours on comparing competitive rates for making pricing decisions. For harnessing and optimizing new and existing revenue streams, hotel revenue managers need a comprehensive view into how the traveler perceives their brand and how their rates compare with those of their competitors. Creating a robust pri...