GDU Ninja Update 46 - Demand Manager

A useful feature has been released that whilst quite small may make your life easier (or more profitable). In the hospitality industry we all understand that Rooms are like ripe apples at the market. If you don't sell them today you will never see the money ever again. The shop selling a can of beans has the advantage that any left over at the end of the day can be sold tomorrow, you don't have that advantage with rooms.

Consequently most property owners are used to the idea of flexing the room rates to maximise their room sales ie Cheap midweek and more expensive weekends etc. Properties in city centres are in intensive competition and are hyper aware of the need to flex rates. This snap shot below shows a Dublin properties room rates over the next 14 days and their rates are varying between 299 and 134. This property has maintained 97% occupancy over February, March and April.

RateFlexing

In the Charts section of the GuestDiary extranet scroll down until you see 'Demand Manager', then select 1 month. This will show you demand for your rooms (the Blue Bar Chart) vs your average room rate (the Black Line). Ideally your rooms rates should be going up as the demand goes up and down as the demand goes down, like in this chart.

However we still come across many properties who are not matching rates to demand, as in this case below when the demand is very high over the new few days then sinks, but the room prices are flat. This property is too cheap during a busy period, or too expensive during a quiet period.

We know, its a bit of work to manage the room rates, and after summer we will have our first version of the Automatic Rate Flexing Tool, that will flex the rates for you, but for the moment this Demand Manager Graph may help you with your pricing decisions, along with the new app that makes it very easy to chage room rates on a frequent basis.