Informatologia, Vol. 46 No. 2, 2013.
Review article
MODERN TRENDS IN RATE AND YIELD MANAGEMENT POLICIES WITH AN EMPHASIS ON WEB BOOKINGS
Maja Šimunić
; Liburnia Riviera Hotels, Opatija, Croatia
Abstract
Today's market and technology development in the form of hotel software solutions as well as the website's involved in selling capacities of individual hotels or hotel chains fully determine the business policy of rate categories with regard to season, occupancy rate, days of week, length of stay, the selling actions etc. One of the biggest challenges today is setting up a competitive rates sold on the third-party websites / distribution channels as booking.com, hrs.com, expedia.com, etc. Why? Because any change in rate category which is mainly affected by the rooms availability and season, the hotel / hotel chain must send to all third-party websites/ distribution channels at the same time or it would not violate "rate parity" partnership that each of these sites request, while rates can change several times a day. Rate parity exists when the same rate structure for a hotel exists across all its distribution channels. This means that everyone must have the lowest rates at the same time. Technology development has greatly contributed to the appearance of systems such as "Rate Tiger", "Channel Manager", etc., which greatly simplifies the work of the hotel in the way that rates are integrated into one system instead of at each site separately, and that system than sends rates on websites which hotel has a contract with. One of the most elegant solutions currently is myfidelio.net paired with Opera hotel software because it offers a solution where rates change by system itself and than sends them to "My fidelio.net" and it saves a lot of time, but also requires the implementation of opera as a hotel software solution, and thus more funding. Nevertheless, a huge job remains to every hotel to stay present and competitive on the market because the web booking increases rapidly and is more present on the Croatian market as well. It is difficult to adjust to today's world standards, because of outdated technology, which is due to the current economic situation more difficult to finance.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
106434
URI
Publication date:
30.6.2013.
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