GRT Hotels & Resorts is a chain of hotels that is backed by the famous GRT Jewelers. The chain has properties in tier 1 and tier 2 cities in South India and cater to both business and leisure travellers. Internet Moguls have been associated with Grand by GRT, their flagship property in Chennai, T Nagar area. With a total of 135 keys and its proximity to US Embassy, the property attracts a lot of NRIs and boasts of some of Chennai’s iconic restaurants such as J. Hind & Bazaar.
To increase the hotel revenue by maximizing number of room nights being booked from OTAs
Dynamic pricing across OTA’s based on in depth research and analysis of past data.
Manage inventory levels on OTA’s basis demand and occupancy status analysis.
Increase RevPar, ARR, Occupancy, total Revenue for the hotel keeping in mind competition set of hotel.
To maintain rate parity across all the channels and monitor the same regularly
Increase ranking and positioning of the hotel on all channels by content optimization. Increase ranking for hotel listing on OTAs for city search.
OTA dominate online sales and hotel was unable to capitalize this source of revenue to its fullest potential on its own manpower.
Despite being the flagship property of a highly reputed chain in a metro city, the hotel had very low bookings from OTAs and was facing tough competition from other hotels.
Loosely defined pricing strategy for OTAs.
Extremely cumbersome process of rate updation causing rate disparity.
Stop the current CRS/Channel manager and migrate to a new one without affecting the business.
OTA offers and deals were largely left unutilized.
Relationship Building With OTAs
Over 700 partner hotels, across the world, has helped us build proper engagement with all global OTA partners. We continually engaged with BDMs, and had daily interaction with them on pickups.
The Revenue Moguls analyzed the current situation on the basis of domestic and international audience, average length of stay, ARR, time of booking, season and suggested unique offers such as mobile offers and offline deals. Separate deals were run for the foreign markets.
Strategic Rate / Price Planning (*Most crucial part of the game)
We studied data from the past 90 days and formulated a hotel specific rate strategy. We rolled out strategic pricing options along with promotions, which were tailor made for all types of prospective guests on online channels to increase look vs book ratio using compset study and city booking trends study.
Ranking on OTA’s improved by improving content score, which is a major part of the algorithm.
We conducted regular audits on the back end of each OTA and optimized the hotel’s profile on them. This led to increase in quality score of profiles, room nights and revenue from online channels, thus improving the OTA ranking.
Auditing of GDS (most often overlooked)
Regular and timely GDS audits were done to ensure that the hotel is available and selling well on GDS. SLA to upload an RFP was immediate or maximum 24hrs and then sent for rate audit on front audit. All rate options loaded on GDS thereby maintaining a good mix of structured as well as unstructured business (public or non-contracted rates) also.
Daily and Weekly Monitoring (internally + with client contacts)
We compared the current productivity of the business on books Vs last year and observed that R/N, ARR and overall revenue increased in comparison of last year. Daily pickup sharing allowed better understanding of the performance.
The revenue moguls studied the analytics based on agency 360 intelligence reports to find city vs competition occupancy rates and city source of their bookings to plan every day pricing strategies. This led to an 8 per cent increase in weekdays, weekend and long weekend ARR.
• Reporting/Forecasting
We compiled month on month comparative reports and monitored the progress closely.
We were pleasantly surprised at how agile and creative the team at UP were. They were very positive throughout a very challenging project and bursting with great ideas. We have achieved a unique web application and will be using Up again in the near future.
Robert Macgregor – Operations Director
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