Based in Europe, with offices in Switzerland and Germany, the company seeks to bring automated, dynamic pricing technology to hospitality businesses globally. According to a company statement, RoomPriceGenie has tripled their revenues over the past 12 months.

The new financing round was co-led by Wingman Ventures and Mutschler Ventures with participation of RKKVC and Zürcher Kantonalbank. Maximilian Engelken of Mutschler Ventures.

“The trust their clients put into RoomPriceGenie, shown not only by the positive feedback but also by the very low churn, shows that automated pricing is crucial to hospitality businesses, even in difficult times,” said Alex Stöckl of Wingman Ventures, who took a significant share in this financing round and who have supported the company for the past two years. “The solution is highly scalable, gives users price recommendations within minutes and is easy to understand, making it the perfect match for a large share of the hospitality market.”

“The solution we provide is starting to be recognized as an essential part of every hospitality operation, whatever the size,” said CEO and Founder Ari Andricopoulos. “Automated pricing assistance is something that will become the norm rather than the exception, for all types of hotels, from family-run businesses to large chains.”

“Current solutions are mainly targeted to large hotels, where dedicated staff is fully focused on revenue management, said Andricopoulos. “We believe that automated pricing needs to be made accessible to anyone. No matter if you run a 10 room hotel or a 45 unit apartment business, the impact that automated pricing has on your business is not comparable to any other software solution out there.”

No doubt, having the right pricing strategy in place and being highly reactive to demand and market changes is crucial to being able to capitalize on piled-up travel demand. “The pandemic has turned many things upside down. Not only last year, but also this year. For a long time, it was highly uncertain when and if travelling was possible. But as soon as borders opened, holiday destinations were run over by travel-eager guests. Most of the properties did not see it coming and were selling their rooms for low prices, even though the demand was sometimes higher than ever before” says Jörg Siegel, CTO and Co-Founder of RoomPriceGenie. “Increasing revenue by 20% by charging higher prices on some days and selling more rooms on others is what we aim for,” he said.

With its intelligent solution, RoomPriceGenie seeks to help hoteliers ensure that their prices are always at a level where supply and demand meet. For hoteliers, that would indeed be a wish come true.

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Agilysys Stay is a full-featured cloud-native enterprise-grade SaaS PMS that delivers personalized guest experiences with powerful operational efficiencies allowing users to focus on connecting with guests on a personal level. As a one-stop solution, Stay provides the capability to increase revenue, improve occupancy and inventory management, reduce costs, and increase brand and guest satisfaction for properties from small destination resorts to large national chains. Agilysys Stay delivers intuitive PMS functionality across operations that empowers users to deliver more meaningful guest experiences.

In addition, Stay’s powerful revenue and analytics tools are a natural fit with Duetto’s, enabling a dynamic open pricing model that fully optimizes their revenue with personalized pricing recommendations.

Key benefits of the Agilysys Stay – Duetto integration include:

• High Quality Data Exchange that provides Duetto with detailed Stay reservation, inventory and group block information that empowers their analytics tools to make intelligent personalized recommendations.
• Real-Time Revenue Optimization that communicates information nearly instantly allowing Duetto GameChanger to respond quickly to changing conditions with pricing recommendations that can then be actioned in Agilysys Stay, ensuring revenue is always optimized.
• Rapid Deployment allowing hoteliers to immediately reap benefits of the combined solutions.

Duetto and Agilysys have been working together since 2016 when Duetto announced its integration with Agilysys LMS and Agilysys Visual One® PMS solutions.

“We’re very proud to be further extending our relationship with Agilysys through this new integration with Agilysys Stay PMS,” said David Woolenberg, CEO, Duetto. “The benefits to hoteliers of working with both these cutting-edge cloud-based technologies is very simple – leveraging our common customer-centric philosophy, each of our solutions seeks to deliver personalized guest experiences that also maximize property revenue.

“We are excited to extend our relationship with Duetto by bringing their solutions to our modern cloud-native PMS solution, Agilysys Stay,” said Rohith Kori, Vice President, Corporate & Product Strategy at Agilysys. “Our integration with Duetto further enhances Agilysys Stay’s unique rate management capabilities including federated rates. With the integration of our industry-leading solutions, our customers can deliver truly exceptional personalized experiences, increase profitability and ensure their most valuable customers return again and again.”

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Founded in 2009, the McDreams group offers low-budget designer rooms in a compact space with a high level of comfort. The hotel group thus appeals in particular to guests who are looking for overnight accommodation for only a short time – such as business people, tradesmen and fitters, as well as vacationers on a stopover.

With Infor EzRMS, McDreams is able to automate its revenue management, optimize its room occupancy and independently analyze market data. The solution identifies the special wishes of guests by their behavior. As a result, hoteliers can address individual needs and provide a highly personalized experience. This can be a significant competitive advantage – especially for hotels located in competitive markets or highly frequented destinations.

McDreams already uses other Infor solutions. The group has been managing all internal hotel management processes with Infor’s cloud-based property management solution, Infor HMS, for several years. Infor HMS enables myriad contactless transaction features for guests, including web-based check-in and check-out, and payment processes, all done remotely and intuitively via smartphone. In addition, the cloud-based property management solution connects different hotels: If a guest in Leipzig wants to know whether a room in Munich is available for the following week, the reception staff can retrieve this information within seconds – an incredible advantage.

“We focus on lean structures wherever possible,” explains Dr. Christoph Klein, manager, McDreams Hotels. “Infor’s solutions allow us to automate a variety of processes and transactions. Even before the recent pandemic, every third guest checked in online. And this trend increases further.”

Infor has been a technology partner to the hospitality industry for more than 20 years, now serving more than 20,000 hotel customers, including 9 of the world’s 10 largest hotel brands. Small individual hotels as well as large hotel groups leverage Infor systems. Infor’s core competence as a “hotel software company” focuses on three areas: property management systems (front office and back office), revenue management systems, and sales & catering.

“The managers of the McDreams hotel group have recognized that automation will become increasingly important for hotels in the future,” said Wolfgang Emperger, Vice President Hospitality EMEAI & LATAM. “Even before the current situation, it was essential for the hospitality industry to have highly efficient processes. This is exactly the goal McDreams is pursuing – and we are happy to support the hotel group in achieving it.”

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Last month, PeakSpan Capital, a growth-stage investment firm which in January closed a second fund with $265 million in capital commitments, also led a $9.5 million Series A financing round just last month for hotel upselling solution platform provider Oaky​.

Launched in 2012 as a “napkin idea” while co-founders Richard Castle and Adam Harris were traveling in Brazil, Cloudbeds was designed as a simplified one-stop-shop technology solution for both property owners and travelers, incorporating integrated components comprised of a property management system, channel manager, booking engine, revenue management system, performance reporting tools, and a marketplace for integrating third-party modules and platform capabilities.

Since its humble beginnings, the company has secured two financing rounds, including an oversubscribed $9-plus million series B round that closed in July 2017, and acquired two companies.

Cloudbeds now reportedly partners with more than 20,000 properties, including hotels, hostels and other vacation properties, in 157 countries, making it one of the leading hospitality management solution for all property types and sizes. While the software has been primarily used by small, independently-owned properties, it can serve the operational needs of larger properties as well.

The all-in-one management solution handles room availability, bookings and other back-office tasks and also automatically syncs with up-to-date booking data across platforms like Airbnb, Expedia and Hotels.com for real-time channel management.

Over the past year, the San Diego, California-based company has grown by leaps and bounds, more than doubling its headcount to more than 400 employees, most of whom work remotely in a total of more than 40 countries.

According to Harris, who serves as CEO, the company surpassed 1,000,000 rooms on its system last year and continues to add tens of thousands of new rooms every week. The plan with the new funding is “to triple down on innovation and continue to transform the hospitality industry to help hoteliers and hosts meet the needs of the next generation of travelers.”

In particular, Cloudbeds intends to use the growth capital to further invest in its technology platform to meet the evolving needs of the hospitality industry. Focus areas will reportedly include new products designed to “deepen hoteliers’ connections with guests” while increasing revenue-enhanced automation to save operational costs with a focus on simplifying both front-and back-office tasks and expansion of Cloudbeds’ API to unlock new opportunities through seamless connections to its marketplace.

The funding round ranks as San Diego’s largest tech deal of 2020 to date.

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Infor HPO is a new pricing solution that delivers comprehensive, AI-based price optimization functionalities to hospitality institutions and hotels of all sizes. The smart calculation tool takes into account the entire customer journey of potential guests, checks the offers of relevant competitors and integrates additional costs of online travel platforms.

Based on various key performance indicators (KPIs), Infor HPO generates a suitable price recommendation multiple times during the day in real-time. The new Infor solution is tailored for hotels of all sizes. Being easy to use, it is particularly suitable for hotels that do not have their own revenue management department or want to expand their options in this area.

Bavaria Boutique Hotel expects to benefit from an optimized and more comprehensible pricing process. Previously, room rates were set manually based on experience. However, variables that were difficult to calculate often led to uncertainties as to whether an offer was in line with market conditions. The new data-driven pricing tool now supports Bavaria Boutique Hotel in determining the optimal daily rates for the next 365 days.

Infor HPO continuously checks the current booking situation in Munich and surrounding areas, takes important events into account, compares the offers of competitors and finally generates a suitable price recommendation. Based on this data and the hoteliers’ expertise, Bavaria Boutique Hotel can optimally align its room rates with the market and thus increase its turnover.

Infor HPO is the second Infor solution the hotel has implemented; it has been using the industry-specific Infor HMS (Hospitality Management Solution) for about two years.

“The assistance provided by the system gives us a secure feeling that we won’t miss any important events or that our prices are completely out of touch with the market,” explains Bernd Gronbach, MD and owner of the Bavaria Boutique Hotel. “Infor HPO offers us a well-founded decision basis on which — combined with our long-term experience — we can always set our room rates in line with the market. Clearly defined contracts, as well as the seamless integration of Infor HPO into the existing Infor HMS solution, are assets as well.”

“The hotel business is a highly competitive environment. This is why operators are often faced with many challenges when it comes to pricing. Are guests willing to pay my calculated room rate? Are there any events in the area that could affect my pricing? How much does the competition charge?” says Stefan Bezold, Infor’s executive sales director DACH & central-eastern Europe. “We developed Infor HPO to provide data-driven answers to these questions. In this way, we help hoteliers to set market-oriented prices, allocate available rooms faster and finally increase profits.”

For more than 20 years, Infor has been a technology partner to the hospitality industry, now serving more than 20,000 hotel customers, including 9 of the world’s 10 largest hotel brands. Small individual hotels, as well as large hotel groups, have leveraged Infor systems. Infor’s core competence as a “hotel software company” focuses on three areas: property management systems (front office and back office), revenue management systems, and sales & catering. Infor solutions can be used in the cloud or on-premise. To learn more about Infor systems for the hospitality industry, visit Infor HMS.

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Accor, the French hospitality company that owns, manages and franchises hotels, resorts and vacation properties in 100 countries with more than 4,800 hotels and 280,000 employees worldwide, making it the single largest hospitality company in Europe, has extended its 13-year relationship with Infor with a global agreement to continue their collaboration with Infor EzRMS revenue management software. The application is currently used at more than 1,100 properties worldwide.

Accor will be able to capitalize on the new functionality of the Infor EzRMS application such as mobile access, function space revenue management, extended stay optimization and a variety of pricing methodologies.

As part of the agreement, Infor will offer three new packages for different properties throughout the Accor portfolio. This will enable Infor to continue to help support the global network of dedicated revenue managers in Accor.

This new agreement allows new brands in the Accor portfolio to benefit from Infor EzRMS, including newly integrated brands.

“Infor EzRMS plays an important role at Accor and is widely deployed because of its ease of use, the portfolio consolidation, and reporting capabilities. We need systems that can support our growth and quickly deliver the information we use to maximize profitability. We are happy to continue our long-term relationship,” said Béla Nagy,Accor senior vice president of revenue strategy and performance.

“This agreement incorporates the new needs of Accor properties across the world,” said Stan van Roij, Infor vice president of hospitality solutions. “This creates a real partnership, expanding it to more international, luxury and leisure brands in the Accor group, strengthening our relationship, and ultimately driving growth by using world-class revenue management strategies.”

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The new Hotel Quality Index (HQI), developed by Beonprice, is a unique way of assessing a hotel’s reputation and market position to improve a property’s REVPAR. Combining traditional revenue management considerations with real-time information about the hotels’ positioning in the marketplace, HQI assesses the best price as well as the chances of selling at that price in the market.

For their hotel partners using HQI, Beonprice’s unique use of technology has led to as much as 11% increase in REVPAR in the first six months of use¹.

Developed with input from former hotel revenue managers, HQI analyses external market data, including product quality and online reputation, using artificial intelligence to calculate an overall quality score for hotels.

The intelligent HQI algorithm evaluates the room weighting value of each product’s characteristics according to the target guest segment to optimise the objective quality to reach the overall quality score. Essentially calculating the value of the product to the most relevant customer at that specific moment in order to optimise the booking rate in relation to sales probability.

“Revenue management is a science, and like all scientific fields, progress brings a deeper understanding and better results,” says Emilio Galan, Chief Technology at Beonprice. “Using HQI, hotels are able to set a multifaceted pricing strategy, refining their rates and estimating the probability of sale for different segments. Having the most accurate pricing recommendations per room and rate type at their fingertips helps our clients meet their goals and react in real-time to market changes.”

Utilizing market-leading technology – combining HQI with traditional revenue data such as historical performance, booking patterns and pace – Beonprice’s RMS can tailor revenue strategies for different market segments, offering a deep understanding of the hotel’s market position and enhanced results whether targeting leisure or corporate travellers.

Exclusive to Beonprice, HQI works as part of the Revenue Management System’s forecasting algorithm, powered by artificial intelligence.

Beonprice, which ranks as one of Europe’s fast-growth B2B hospitality travel technology companies, is dedicated to improving its customers’ business results, combining its technology with clear, user-friendly dashboards; exemplary customer service with a dedicated revenue strategy expert assigned to each customer; and an online Academy providing revenue training for hotel staff. Beonprice has more than 2,000 clients in more than 30 countries, its RMS is used successfully by growing hotel chains such as Hotelatelier, HM Resorts, Iberostar, RIU, Paradores, Dreamplace, Hospes, Palafox, Grupo Velas, Viaggio  and many more.

Notes
1 – Increase based on client results in first six months of use of HQI

For more information, contact:
Ryan Haynes, Haynes MarComs: ryan@ryanhaynesmarketing.com; tel: +44 (0)7919 510051

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To make sure a hotel is not missing out on revenue, room prices need to get updated at the highest frequency possible. Revenue opportunities that used to exist for a matter of days or even hours can be gone in a matter of minutes or even seconds – especially in hyper dynamic cities like New York, London, or Singapore and especially during the final hours of the booking window.

Real-time rate optimization has, for a long time, been seen as fiction – but not anymore. By continuously leveraging the newest data points, Atomize RMS calculates the optimal rate via real-time optimization algorithms and then automatically pushes those rates back to the PMS (Property Management System) through a 2-way connection.

That means hotels using Atomize will continuously have real-time rates pushed live, around the clock, 365 days into the future, dynamically for all room types. This ground-breaking new technology brings the hotel industry into a new era – the future is here today.

“Revenue managers can no longer afford to base pricing decisions on outdated market information. I’m very proud to say that Atomize is the first RMS in the industry supporting real-time price optimization. To use Atomize RMS gives a hotel a huge competitive edge, and now revenue managers can trust that their pricing is always 100% optimal and never again leave money on the table,” says Alexander Edström, the CEO of Atomize.

Atomize is a rising star within the field of Revenue Management and the first RMS ever to offer real-time pricing optimization. Headquartered in Sweden, Atomize helps hotels around the globe to maximize their revenue by automatically setting the optimal price for every room type. Atomize is used in more than 40 countries, across five continents, by hotel properties ranging from 40 to 1250 rooms.

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The ability to integrate new sources of data has also played a key role in driving smarter pricing decisions. Advanced revenue management solutions leverage not only the repository of historic data that resides in a hotel’s property management system, but also, in many cases, a vast array of market intelligence and other data, from competitor rates data to booking trends data. This makes it possible to more accurately forecast demand, and, as a result, increase hotel revenue and profitability in unprecedented ways.

That being the case, it’s no surprise that next-generation, AI-powered revenue management has taken the industry by storm. Some of the leading AI-powered solutions, often replacing legacy solutions that use a hands-on, rules-based approach for generating pricing decisions, now automatically generate in excess of a 100 million decisions across tens of thousands of properties each day. The results are impressive, with major hotel brands seeing their revenue numbers increase by millions of dollars a year. Smaller properties, too, are seeing substantial gains, in some cases driving incremental sales lift by more than 15 percent.

Interestingly, AI-powered solutions sometimes produce pricing decisions that  revenue managers may view as overly aggressive, irrational, or just plain wrong. Therein lies the power of big data and machine learning compared to the data processing and analytical capabilities of mere mortals. Even the most experienced revenue managers report that they have sold rates recommended by AI-enabled solutions that they would not have published in the past.

AI-powered revenue management is all about smart pricing. It’s about using demand forecasts, competitor rates, and price sensitivities — while taking into account any number of other inputs, including demand drivers like seasonality, special event dates, and day-of-week differences —to maximize room occupancy at the best possible price. Smart pricing also means considering other factors, such as the type of room, the length of stay, and the extent to which a discounted price promotion could potentially dilute revenue and profits in the long run. The combinatorial complexities involved in smart pricing are nothing to sneeze at.

Smart pricing is channel agnostic. Rather than thinking in terms of “OTA booking versus direct booking,” for example, smart pricing considers the relative value of all distribution channels, weighing how much each channel drives guest room demand and will help achieve the overriding objective, which is to maximize the profitability of hotel inventory. Smart pricing calculates demand from all sources, including OTAs. In an ideal world, algorithms then automatically apply the right tactics and strategy to funnel business through the most profitable channels.

The goal of maximizing profitability holds true not only for guest rooms but also for other property assets and revenue sources. Banquet and event function space, in particular, now increasingly factors into the equation. According to “The 2019 Global Meetings Forecast,” published by American Express, demand for function space was expected to grow by 3.2% this year. For some hotels, function space revenue now accounts for almost half of their total revenue. It only stands to reason, then, that hotels would be eager to apply revenue management strategies to their group sales and catering activities.

Total revenue management, as this bigger-picture approach to revenue optimization is often called, takes into account a guest’s potential spend on recreational facilities, restaurants, spas, and various other ancillary revenue streams when making pricing decisions. For hotels with casino operations, even the “theoretical loss” (the amount of money a specific category of player can be expected to lose during their stay) should ideally factor into guest room and group sales pricing decisions.

Empowering a hotel with the ability to make smart pricing decisions in an automated fashion makes the business case for investing in an AI-powered revenue management solution compelling. It is compelling in terms of driving increased profitability. It is also compelling in terms of averting potential revenue loss that can result when a hotel fails to maximize occupancy or, worse, experiences a loss in occupancy. Consider: A mere $2 reduction in the ADR for a 500-room hotel with a 75 percent occupancy rate would cost it more than a quarter million dollars in lost profit in a single year.

Other benefits abound. The business intelligence gleaned from the reporting capabilities, for example, can help improve sales effectiveness, generate competitive intelligence, and provide valuable insights into occupancy trends, guest demographics, market positioning, and channel profitability. A marketing department can use the forecasts as a guide for determining when to increase promotional spend to spur demand. An operations team can know when to increase (or decrease) staffing based on projected occupancy. In short, the benefits tend to go well beyond the department known as “revenue management,” ultimately transcending all parts of the organization.

Adapted from The 2019 Smart Decision Guide to Hospitality Revenue Management, which is now available for complimentary download. It can be accessed here. (Disclosure: Starfleet Media, the parent company of Starfleet Research, is the publisher of Hotel Technology News and Restaurant Technology News.)

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Until a few years ago, this inventory was managed manually by a large team of revenue management analysts. According to Goldner, they put time and effort into ensuring that bookings were happening at the right pace, and the right price. They did so by analysing trends in the market and what the business needed to achieve, and then reacted accordingly. However, as the group has continued to grow, it became clear that it would be impossible to manage those millions of price points without some sort of artificial intelligence (AI).

To kick off its digital innovation efforts, the cruiseliner has worked with strategy firms Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Accenture to better understand the opportunities. What the research showed, says Goldner, was that more could be done by segmenting customer groups. That was a good first step, because although the group has typically achieved 100% occupancy of its cabins, it soon became clear that there was an opportunity to proactively manage prices for different groups.

“We are on a journey and this is the first major step. Over time we are trying to figure out the right mix between human intervention and pricing controls versus automation,” Goldner explains. Like the airlines, which still operate a hybrid, model, he adds, “the answer is [probably] somewhere in the middle and we are getting comfortable with it slowly”.

Active management

To date Royal Caribbean’s automation efforts have been implemented in booking windows that have typically not been actively managed. For example, those that are about 10 months out from the date a ship sets sail versus just a month. “We see different customer types buying during those windows,” Goldner explains, adding that historically, there had been no active price management in these cases because of a lack of resources and limited booking activity.

Working with Accenture, which is now managing a portion of the inventory through automation, a major focus has been to look at elasticity of pricing. “As part of this, we have built an AI model that is continuously learning and adapting to what we are seeing in the market, and the impact that price changes can have on demand,” Holden explains.

Although the shift to automation is often viewed as a cost-cutting exercise, this is not the case at Royal Caribbean. “We are not replacing analysts but rather changing the jobs that they do,” he stresses. In other words, whereas today an analyst might be using a system to manually change a price, in the future they might be managing controls to make the price change.

In fact, the group is adding different types of roles and skillsets. For example, it has recently hired four data scientists and a senior vice president of AI who is building an entire team and department to take the project forward.  Although consultants have helped to lay the foundations, the idea eventually is to bring the capability in house.

Goldner is clear: “AI and ML is not an effort to cut costs. It’s really to increase the scope of what we manage and it helps us be less one-dimensional about the client.”

The work at Royal Carribbean reflects a wider industry trend: to segment better and deliver more targeted offers. Increasingly, companies know who the customer is, what they like to book, what matters most, price or product – and so on. “In order to really take advantage of that you need pricing and promotional capability that allows you to execute on the information, and a lot work we are doing [with AI] lets us do that.”

So, while the cruise industry may be lagging the rest of the travel industry in its efforts, Goldner is clear: “There is a ton of opportunity.”

Join Hotel Technology News (a proud media partner) at EyeforTravel North America, Chicago, EyeforTravel North America 2019, Chicago, Oct 28-29 to hear more from Royal Caribbean and other leading travel brands including Hilton, Marriott and more

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