The hotel industry is growing progressively and showing no signs of slowing down. Digitally knowledgeable travelers use online platforms to plan, book, and feel a journey. The hotel industry is progressively getting to grips with the concepts of big data and many ways web data usage in hotel pricing can assist them in generating revenue and offering a superior customer experience.
How Can Web Data Help in Understanding Hotel Pricing?
Today’s intelligent customers do a lot of research. They compare prices from various websites before making any buying decisions. Price comparison sites, particularly in the hotel industry, have expanded to deal with active consumers over the years. These sites allow consumers to match prices across companies with just a few clicks! This, in return, increases the pressure of competitive pricing between companies. That is where dynamic pricing has a role to play.
You can apply dynamic pricing across different industries like hotels and e-commerce, and it is a potent yet unused revenue management tool. Dynamic pricing is a safer way of refining business financials by maximizing margins and revenue. Dynamic pricing is a “game-changer,”, particularly in industries having fierce competition.
[Source: Statista – A survey on the significance of dynamic pricing in 2017, Germany]
Pricing is tough. Many hoteliers strive to get the proper stability between overpricing and underselling. Getting web data using web scraping hotel prices can help you maximize profits by changing room prices daily, hourly, or by the minute.
Factors Which Affect the Dynamics of Hotel Pricing
Any hotel pricing tactic aims to maximize the bottom line. However, managing this complex pricing model is highly challenging. It relies on different factors like:
1. Hotel’s Capacity
Hotel pricing mainly depends on the availability of rooms and customer demands. If a hotel anticipates complete booking around specific events, they can increase the room prices and still have sufficient bookings. Similarly, hotels decrease the rates close to coming if the anticipated occupancy isn’t fulfilled.
2. Type of Room
Usually, you would anticipate the hotel suite rooms to cost the same. It is not the case as every room is differently rated and comes with various facilities. A room with a beach view might cost more than one facing a parking lot.
3. Discounts
Clever travelers with limited budgets always search for deals and discounts to save money. Promotion is an excellent initiative for keeping up and staying ahead of the competition.
4. Competitors’ Prices
Hotels usually try and increase revenue by matching competitors on pricing. It assists them in strategically positioning themselves before their customers by considering the present market situation.
5. Booking Time or Date
Conventionally, you can adjust hotel prices depending on how far they get customers who made reservations in advance. At times, customers that wait for the last moments usually make off having the finest deals at the lowest pricing.
6. Central Location
Tremendous demand exists for hotels centrally positioned in the city or near common tourist locations. Similarly, room prices go up in case a hotel hosts important conferences or seminars.
7. Shifting Seasons
Hotel room prices at tourist places will drop in the off-season. The hotels aim to make the most of their income before demand decreases by increasing the prices during peak seasons.
8. Demand Predictions
Fixing the “right price” needs ample forecasting. Management must have a solid grasp of the demand levels for daily hotel prices competently.
9. Network Effects
The network effect is the surge in value and demand provided by services based on usage through more people. The network effects are the by-products of your hotel’s popularity. People are ready to pay more to stay at popular destinations.
10. Rules and Regulations
Governing bodies like the government thoroughly monitor the hotel industry. The hotel pricing strategies should follow pricing rules & regulations.
The parameters would be scraped and changed with hotel data extraction into usable, meaningful, and well-structured data.
How Hotels Use Dynamic Pricing to Provide the Right Prices at the Right Time?
Dynamic Pricing offers many advantages to the hotel industry,
Raise Room Revenue, Revenue Per Available Room (RevPAR), and Average Daily Rate (ADT)
Match ever-changing pricing trends within minutes by observing competitors’ pricing
Make the price procedure more effective, as automation makes that faster, easier, and more accurate
Give scope to experiment using the “higher to lower” approach, where a hotel quotes higher prices at the start of a day and low down the pricing later if demands fail to appear, as opposed to the “lower to higher” approach, where pricing is increased depending on total rooms reserved.
Therefore, how to formulate a dynamic pricing strategy?
It depends on a reliable and timely source of quality data scraped by web scraping Hotel data. Web data crawlers parse real-time price limits from thousands of sites.
Hotel web scraping assists hotels in predicting when demands will be low or high. Prices get lowered to fascinate visitors to book empty rooms in the low-demand periods. Contrariwise, hotel prices will be highest during peak season or critical local events. Although the primary forecast turns inaccurate, the pricing can be rapidly adjusted to real-time demand variations.
Besides rates management, hotel data scraping is helpful for:
- Data-driven tactics
- Meaningful reports
- Perceptive data analytics
People widely use web scraping to do competitor research. Watching competitors’ prices is a wonderful tool for analyzing market reactions. It provides actionable data that will assist you in staying one step ahead of the competition. Depending on market trends, businesses can select either a penetration pricing model or a premium price model.
An accurate dynamic pricing model is always more personalized and flexible. So, the pricing will differ from one customer to another depending on their buying habits. You can use web scraping to scrape customers’ behavioral data, including spending behaviors and readiness to search for better prices.
Today top hotels are using price intelligence solutions for business transformation. Once you get relevant data using hotel price scraping, you can get more understanding and insights about the demand curve and customer preferences. With this knowledge, you can adjust pricing parameters to get more for your business.
How Can Web Data Help Hotels Implement Dynamic Pricing?
The cut-throat competition in the hotel industry has ensured that fixed pricing strategies won’t work anymore. Dynamic pricing is the key to crucial financial improvement.
Setting a dynamic pricing model involves planning, analyzing, designing, and building pricing models by adjusting parameters and making customer communications. If it proves to be a monetary overhead, businesses can go for any third-party service provider. Today, hotels have started investing in data analytics.
Do you need a dynamic pricing strategy depending on clean and dependable competitor data scraped with data extraction from thousands of hotel and travel websites? Contact Actowiz Solutions’ specialists for affordable and efficient web scraping services. You can also reach us for all your mobile app and web scraping service requirements.
