Integrating Forward Looking Search Data into Your Tech Stack

Revenue management has become increasingly complex, involving a web of segments, room types, distribution channels, discounting strategies, promotions, and cancellation policies.

To compound this, in today’s fiercely competitive market, traditional forecasting methods that once offered reliable insights are no longer sufficient to maintain your competitive edge.

As a revenue manager, you’re trying to make sense of these complexities, all while staying attuned to rapid shifts in demand and racing to capture bookings before your competition.

The unpredictability of demand, coupled with relentless competition can make this a pretty daunting task.

But, here’s the key: every online booking starts with a search. The more information you have on consumers’ search behavior gives you a valuable edge in predicting market demand before your competitors.

This is where predictive market intelligence plays a pivotal role.

By analyzing pre-booking search data, you quickly and easily grasp demand shifts in your market and take action.

While other hoteliers are spending time trying to make sense of historical data sets, you’ve cut through the noise with a clear snapshot of market demand and are already acting on these insights by targeting the right traveler, at the right time, with the right pricing and marketing strategies.

In this piece we will highlight how having future market demand signals available with the click of a button could be your ticket to a competitive edge over your compset, especially when combined with complementary revenue management tools.

Forward-looking data: The secret to smarter hotel demand forecasting

Forward-looking search data is information collected when consumers are in the inspiration phase of their journey, browsing different websites and online travel agencies (OTAs), searching for their perfect trip.

Good examples of these higher-funnel data sets are hotel and flight search patterns. These provide a sound understanding of booking intent to help you anticipate future market behavior, instead of waiting until guests have booked a room and using the data from your property management system (PMS) to inform your commercial decisions.

So, why wait for bookings when you can read demand signals early?

When you better understand booking intent for your market, you can build correlations to demand trends at your property – turning these initial search signals into revenue opportunities.

By quickly grasping pre-booking market demand you can make proactive decisions as you see demand shifts, taking advantage of potential revenue opportunities.

This sounds great, but I’m sure you’re wondering, just how reliable is forward-looking search data when predicting demand at your hotel?

The proof: Forward-looking search data drives results

At Lighthouse we conducted extensive research into just that and found a positive correlation between flight and hotel search data, and hotel occupancy.

By evaluating daily, weekly and monthly hotel performance against flight and hotel search data, we observed that high flight and hotel search volumes translate into high levels of market demand. This then results in increased hotel occupancy in the specified market.

We also examined at what stage can flight and hotel searches show signs of demand. Flight and hotel searches occur days, weeks, or even months before hotels begin to see any pickup in reservations.

For example (from the same research) we found that for stays in Singapore in August 2022, Market Insight recorded:

Hotels in Singapore that saw bookings being made for the month of August 2022, in the same month, could see signs of demand picking up for these bookings, 145 days prior in the flight search data, and 80 days prior in the hotel search data in Market Insight.

As you can see, access to forward-looking search data provides you with an extended window to shape your commercial strategy, much before your compset.

These new data points are easy to understand but impossible for you to manually collate and analyze. That’s why a predictive market intelligence solution, like Market

Insight, does the hard work for you, turning forward-looking search data into your silver bullet to outpace your competition.

Transform your hotel’s forecasting with Market Insight: Predictive intelligence that drives revenue

Market Insight is an industry first predictive market intelligence solution featuring a combination of forward-looking data sources.

From real-time OTA and metasearch data to flight search trends, events, and alternative lodging insights, Market Insight aggregate the freshest, most accurate picture of booking intent and future travel demand.

How it works

The unique AI technology processes billions of data points per destination, transforming raw data into real-time demand levels, all broken down by sub-location, stay pattern, and hotel types.

This is provided to you in the form of simple and actionable insights, available

from one centralized dashboard – along with instant alerts so you can take action and capitalize immediately on market opportunities.

Your competitive advantage

With Market Insight, you’ll spot opportunities before your competition. By quickly grasping pre-booking market demand at your hotel you can take advantage of potential revenue opportunities as demand shifts, before your compset, with the right pricing and promotions, and targeted marketing strategies.

Not only can you improved your forecasting accuracy and speed up your forecasting time to decision; but with knowledge of insights like average length-of-stay and destination origin you can:

• Optimize budgets

• Deliver improved ROI and increased revenue

• Create personalized advertising for markets where you know demand exists

• Drive direct bookings with targeted marketing for brand.com

• Perfect your pricing and promotions depending on demand conditions

You can take this a step further by integrating these actionable insights with other revenue management solutions such as a rate shopper or business intelligence solution.

This integrated approach opens up new possibilities to drive business growth.

Integrating predictive demand intelligence with other tools in your tech stack

By examining what potential travelers are searching for, rather than focusing on what they have already booked offers valuable insights into emerging demand. Combining Market Insight’s ability to forecast demand trends up to 365 days ahead with other tools in your hotel’s tech stack creates a powerful synergy that expands your revenue management capabilities.

This is most evident when paired with a rate shopping solution such as Rate Insight.

Rate Insight and Market Insight: Your revenue advantage

When real-time rate intelligence meets predictive demand data, you gain an unmatched competitive edge.You can set room prices that precisely match true market demand, while your compset are trying to piece together forecasts and pricing strategies.

Real-time intelligence, at your fingertips

Rate shopping tools, like Rate Insight, gives you access to the current, past, and future rates of your competitors (including short-term rentals) across all distribution channels, in real-time.

This means you can make well-informed, data-based pricing and promotional decisions to capture all available revenue opportunities.

Supercharge your pricing strategy

Rate Insight’s demand metric already gives you a 60-day view into the future. But connect it with Market Insight, and you unlock something more powerful.

When combined, you’ll have a more granular data set at your disposal, so the precision and reliability of Rate Insight’s demand metric is greatly improved.

Not only that, but your demand metric is increased to a 365-day view into the future. This extends the window of opportunity to craft your pricing and promotional strategy to capture demand far ahead of your market competitors.

The end result? Instead of just reacting to market dynamics, you’re proactively making data-driven decisions to capture revenue opportunities before your competition.

Business intelligence: Helping you drive commercial success

Market dynamics never stop evolving and your commercial strategy shouldn’t either.

As market conditions fluctuate, it’s essential for you to not only have a well constructed commercial strategy in place but also to ensure it is flexible enough to adapt to changing dynamics.

One platform. Complete clarity

With the right technology at your side, you can continuously monitor, adjust, and optimize this strategy to drive better business outcomes. Business Intelligence centralizes your commercial data into a single, dynamic view.

By drawing from your PMS, Business Intelligence centralizes all your commercial data on a single, dynamic platform. From a quick glance at top performance metrics to deep strategic dives, the entire commercial team, from revenue to sales has all the data they need for performance assessment and decision making.

Power up with predictive intelligence

Now add Market Insight’s forward looking demand data into the mix and your commercial teams have a powerful combination to strategically drive business performance. All your commercial data, historical and predictive, working together to drive better business outcomes.

Market Insight’s demand metric flows into Business Intelligence’s ‘Day by Day’ module, in the strategy tab, so you can see pin-point market demand predictions next to data sets such as hurdle rate, best available rates (BAR), on-the-books (OTB), revenue and competitor rates to drive better decision making.

Turning insights into action: A practical example

Let’s look at a quick example. You see that OTB is low, as is your pickup and compset rates. If you then see that your forward looking demand indicator is also you can be supremely confident that you are looking at a low-demand period and can price and market your property accordingly.

Some of the most critical business decisions are made in this tab and now you will be even better informed with demand metrics up to 365 days into the future.

Predictive demand intelligence: A new approach to hotel demand forecasting

Market Insight extends the window of opportunity for you to convert bookings. By collecting, analyzing, and displaying live forward-looking data in real-time, you can:

• Monitor market demand for the next 365 days, spot opportunities before competitors, and sell at the best possible price

• Address guests with targeted offers matching their segment, source market, dates, and desired length of stay

• Have real-time market data at hand to proactively maximize every demand change, while avoiding leaving money on the table when markets suddenly shift

• Collaborate better with sales and marketing teams by sharing relevant data to create targeted promotions and sales goals, ensuring the overall commercial strategy is aligned.

Quality data is central to understanding market dynamics. With Market Insight you have access to the best data in the industry which is distilled into actionable demand insights at the click of a button – so you can make confident revenue decisions.

While historical data still has its place, post-pandemic booking behavior and an increasingly competitive market have shown that to forge ahead of your compset, your demand forecasting needs to evolve.

Demand forecasting should be the first step in your hotel’s commercial strategy, and this begins with a predictive market intelligence solution. By better anticipating future demand, you can spot and take advantage of short, mid, and long-term revenue opportunities ahead of your competition.

No more guessing. No more waiting. No more missed opportunities. Just clear market signals driving confident decisions across your organization.

The results speak for themselves:

• Market Insight users see a 4.7% boost in yearly occupancy

• They also see a 2.3% growth in yearly RevPAR

• Market Insight data can boost occupancy forecasting by up to 20%

To make the most of Market Insight’s location-specific, segmented demand data, integrate it with a suite of complementary solutions like Rate Insight and Business Intelligence.

You can tackle all aspects of commercial strategy with laser-sharp focus and have ultimate confidence in your decision making be it pricing, distribution, or marketing.

Ready to transform your hotel’s commercial performance? Contact us to discover the power of data-driven decisions.

About Lighthouse

Lighthouse (formerly OTA Insight) is the leading commercial platform for the travel & hospitality industry. We transform complexity into confidence by providing actionable market insights, business intelligence, and pricing tools that maximize revenue growth. We continually innovate to deliver the best platform for hospitality professionals to price more effectively, measure performance more efficiently, and understand the market in new ways.

Trusted by over 65,000 hotels in 185 countries, Lighthouse is the only solution that provides real-time hotel and short-term rental data in a single platform. We strive to deliver the best possible experience with unmatched customer service. We consider our clients as true partners—their success is our success.