The objective of rate parity in hotels is to encourage consumers to book direct. They should not find any advantage of booking via a third party website over making a reservation on your own hotel website. Learn in this weeks article how to get organized and use rate parity as a hotel revenue management tool.
In order to implement rate parity properly in a hotel, and truly have the same price over all your distribution channels, you need to log and configure the taxes and margins of the 3rd party websites correctly.
Too often we still see hotels making calculation mistakes. Simple math is at the basis of this. And of course we need to know what the difference is between margin and mark-up. This occasionally still is a challenge.
Make an excel table with all the conditions of each portal, include;
- Tax % (included / excluded)
- Net / commissionable
- Margin % / fees
- Cancelation policies
- Payment policies
- Free sale / allotment
- Release
It will help you better understand your hotel distribution mix.
Next step is to configure your channel management system with the correct margin and taxes so you can easily load the same sell rate for each extranet.
Having the same rates on all public distribution channels will stimulate for more consumers to book directly with your hotel.
One final important question remains, can they find easily your website?
