trivago Business Intelligence data has revealed that independent hotels visible on trivago have on average 8,000 rates online a year.

NB This is a viewpoint by trivago

Considering that a hotel’s rates are displayed across multiple booking sites and vary according to room type, whether meals and other amenities are included, demand, seasonality and other variables, this number is not surprising.

Nor is it surprising that with every additional room and booking partner, the number of rates visible online for a hotel becomes even bigger.

It is not humanly possible for a hotelier to keep track manually of all their hotel’s rates, not to mention their competitors’, to say nothing on the usual fluctuations in travel demand.

Yet hoteliers cannot establish a competitive pricing strategy without monitoring their competitors’ rates and demand patterns.

This presents no small challenge to hoteliers – how to track thousands and thousands of room rates and demand, analyze all that data to position their properties in the market and know when and by how much to adjust their rates to stay competitive and boost RevPAR.

It’s a challenge that is becoming more pressing as the booking journey shifts online and travelers turn to metasearch to access a transparent market where they can easily find the lowest available rate for their ideal hotel.

Which begs the question: If travellers are using price comparison data in making their booking decisions, why then can’t hoteliers use that same data to make their pricing decisions? Why can’t they too have a transparent overview of the market, with access to hotel rates from across hundreds of booking channels and a way to quickly compare them on a single dashboard?

In fact, they can.

Data, data, everywhere, aggregated and made actionable

trivago has access to billions of rates aggregated from hundreds of booking sites. It realised this data could enable hoteliers to easily and quickly establish competitive pricing strategies.

This realization, combined with a mission to empower hoteliers to be competitive online and a conviction that data-driven decisions are crucial to business success, inspired the development of a new rate shopper, one powered by metasearch and aptly named Rate Insights.

For hoteliers, the advantage of using a rate shopper feature that pulls data from a leading metasearch is enormous: a metasearch is not limited to the hotel prices advertised on a single channel; it doesn’t need to predict what rates bookings sites are showing; and it doesn’t have to estimate how much demand there is for hotels in any given location at any given time.

It has data. Cold, hard, competitive-pricing-strategy-empowering data. Real rates aggregated from hundreds of booking sites and precise numbers of real travelers searching for hotels.This data is displayed on a single dashboard that’s easy to navigate, because all the data in the world is worth nothing if it’s not easy to understand. Hoteliers need to harness the data in order for it to have an impact on strategic decision making.

The bottom line – metasearch is not just pressuring hoteliers to be more competitive online; it’s also empowering them to be.

Access to over 5 billion room rates

The hotel industry is now in an age in which utilizing data is increasingly crucial in laying the foundation of future success. Hotel technology providers must step up and provide tools to aggregate rates and empower hoteliers to use this data to establish competitive pricing strategies.

NB This is a viewpoint by Trivago