How Pricing Manager and Channel Manager Can Increase Independent Hotels’ Occupancy and Revenue

In this article, we’ll explore how, with the right tools and the right strategy, you can be better equipped to boost your hotel’s performance while cutting down on the stress that comes with running an independent hotel.

It’s Thursday afternoon, and you’re glancing at your bookings for the weekend.

They could be better.

You’d had high hopes for this weekend, especially with the inaugural marathon kicking off in town – a perfect opportunity to bring in more guests and fill those last rooms.

Yet here you are, just two days out, with a few rooms still unsold.

Your competitors have been quick to adjust their rates, some raising prices; and others offering last-minute deals. But between managing staff, guest requests, and everything else, you haven’t had a moment to dive into your pricing strategy. Now you’re left wondering: should you drop your rates to fill those rooms, or push them higher to capture more revenue?

Without the time to analyze market conditions and adjust your rates, your decisions feel more like a gamble than a strategy. And when it comes to your bottomline, guesswork can cost you – lost revenue, unsold rooms, and the frustration of missed opportunities.

There has to be a better way to take control of your pricing without adding more to your busy workload.

Fortunately, there are ways you can eliminate the guesswork from your pricing strategy and availability, allowing you to respond to market changes quickly and confidently – without the stress of manually adjusting rates or missing out on revenue opportunities.

In this article, we’ll explore how, with the right tools and the right strategy, you can be better equipped to boost your hotel’s performance while cutting down on the stress that comes with running an independent hotel.

Measuring your hotel’s performance?

Before making any pricing adjustments, it’s important to have a clear picture of how your hotel is performing. By tracking a few key metrics, you’ll be able to pinpoint areas for improvement and guide your decisions. 

For independent hoteliers, understanding these metrics is crucial, especially when you don’t have the luxury of a large team or dedicated analysts. Track them over time, and you’ll start to see trends emerge that can significantly improve the long-term success and profitability of your property.

• Occupancy rate (OCC): This metric shows how many rooms are filled over a specific period. While it’s a good indicator of how well you’re selling rooms, it doesn’t tell the full revenue story. That’s where the next two metrics come in.

• Revenue per Available Room (RevPAR): Combining occupancy and pricing performance, RevPAR gives a clearer picture of how much revenue each room is generating, helping you evaluate overall financial success.

• Average Daily Rate (ADR): ADR reflects the average price guests are paying for rooms and is a good measure of your financial health. Comparing your ADR against competitors helps you understand where you stand in the market. The key is balancing a strong ADR with higher occupancy to maximize revenue.

• Direct vs. OTA bookings: Direct bookings are more profitable since they bypass OTA commissions. However, OTAs can boost visibility and occupancy. Monitoring this ratio will help you strike the right balance between profitability and reach.

• Guest reviews: In an information age, your hotel’s reputation is critical in attracting new guests. Positive reviews can set you apart, while negative ones can hurt occupancy. Regularly tracking feedback enables you to fine-tune your service and offerings.

Tracking these key metrics builds a solid foundation to evaluate your hotel’s current performance.

However, understanding where you stand is only the first step.

The real challenge comes in making timely adjustments to your pricing strategy to respond to changing demand – something that’s nearly impossible to do manually – and pushing these rates through to your various selling channels, timeously.

Enter dynamic pricing.

The importance of dynamic pricing in hotel revenue

The days of a ‘set and forget’ room-pricing strategy are long gone. Static room rates which you only change due to seasonality or the incoming weekend, simply don’t cut it in a highly competitive market, where the margins are so fine.

Demand for rooms can change overnight, whether it’s due to an event, holiday, or even a sudden influx of visitors. Keeping your prices static risks undercharging when demand surges or leaving rooms empty during quieter times.

Dynamic pricing enables you to automatically adjust room rates in real-time based on:

• Market demand: When there’s a surge in demand, dynamic pricing raises your rates accordingly, maximizing revenue.

• Booking patterns: Prices can adjust depending on when guests typically book, ensuring you capture last-minute bookings or early reservations at the right price.

• Competitor rates: Keeping an eye on what nearby hotels are charging ensures you stay competitive.

Instead of spending hours manually tweaking rates, Lighthouse’s Pricing Manager uses real-time data to help you offer the right price at the right time, automatically. Automated decisions mean more bookings, increased revenue, and no more constant price monitoring.

While dynamic pricing solves the problem of keeping up with market changes, the reality for many independent hoteliers is that managing this across multiple platforms, while also running daily operations, is overwhelming. The more hands-on the process, the more prone it is to delays, errors, and missed bookings.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the specific challenges hoteliers, like you, are often facing.

Challenges faced by independent hoteliers

• Manual price adjustments: Adjusting prices manually isn’t just time-consuming – it can delay your response to changes in market demand. By the time you’ve updated your rates, competitors may have already capitalized on demand, and you’re left playing catch-up. 

For independent hoteliers, who often have countless responsibilities, it’s hard to dedicate the necessary time to constantly monitor room prices..

• Over- or underpricing: Without automation, setting the right price becomes a daily battle. Overpricing could mean fewer bookings while underpricing eats into your revenue. The key concern is that when prices need to change quickly based on fluctuations in demand, a manual approach could result in missed opportunities.

• Manual channel management: Independent hoteliers are already stretched thin with the demands of daily operations. Manually adjusting room availability across multiple platforms is a slow, error-prone process. This often results in inconsistent availability across booking channels, causing double bookings or rooms to register as unavailable when they are, in fact, open. 

Not only does this lead to mistakes, but you’re wasting precious hours on repetitive tasks that are easily automated – time that could be spent charming your current guests into repeat visitors.

These challenges aren’t just frustrating – they’re also preventing you from maximizing your hotel’s revenue and performance. The good news: by using the right tools, you can streamline these time-consuming tasks and focus on what really matters, delivering an exceptional experience for your guests.

Let’s explore how automating your pricing, promotions, and room availability can free up your time, reduce errors, and help your hotel reach its full potential.

Streamlining your pricing, promotion, availability

As guest expectations rise, managing these tasks across platforms is becoming increasingly complex.

However, by centralizing these tasks and automating manual processes, you can cut down on tedious admin tasks, eliminate human errors, and optimize your pricing strategy more effectively.

• Centralized control: By using a system that centralizes your room inventory, rates, and availability, you can ensure that updates are instantly reflected across all booking channels. This reduces the risk of overbookings and eliminates discrepancies in pricing, giving you full control and a clearer overview of your property’s performance.

• Time savings through automation: Automated updates for your rates, promotions, and availability means that a single adjustment is reflected across all channels, saving you countless hours of manual work. This reduces administrative work, so you can focus on running your hotel and improving guest satisfaction.

• Streamlined pricing strategies: Automated systems allow you to implement dynamic pricing strategies that adjust in real-time, based on market demand, competitor actions, and seasonal fluctuations. This ensures that your pricing stays competitive without constant oversight. As demand shifts, your rates adjust accordingly, helping you capture more bookings and revenue.

• Real-time data analysis: Access to real-time data allows you to monitor market trends and competitor pricing, optimizing your strategy across varying demand levels, special events, and seasonal changes. 

This proactive approach helps you react faster and with greater accuracy, ensuring that you maximize revenue opportunities during peak times (and don’t miss out during quieter periods).

For example, when local events increase demand, real-time data enables you to raise your rates immediately, ensuring you capture every opportunity.

Managing your pricing, promotions, and availability efficiently is only half the battle. To fully overcome these daily challenges and ensure your hotel runs smoothly, you need tools that can automate these processes and provide data-driven insights to make faster, smarter decisions.

How Pricing Manager & Channel Manager can help

As an independent hotelier, balancing all of your daily responsibilities means taking the time out to manually monitor and adjust rates, promotions and room availability can can easily be neglected and postponed to another day.

This is where Pricing Manager and Channel Manager come into play. 

They work together in a single centralized platform and offer an all-in-one, automated solution that helps you take full control of your hotel’s pricing and distribution while minimizing the manual workload.

Here’s how they take the pressure off:

• AI-driven rate recommendations: Pricing Manager delivers hourly rate suggestions for the next 365 days, based on real-time data specific to your occupancy levels, competitor pricing, and market trends. 

• Automated price & distribution updates: Channel Manager automatically pushes prices, promotions, and availability to all of your connected booking channels in real-time. This prevents overbookings and ensures that your information is always accurate.

• Quick, visual insights & autopilot: Pricing Manager gives you a clear visualized dashboard of your rates, occupancy and competitor data. You can make adjustments with one click or let Autopilot handle all of the updates for you.

• Reliable, data-backed decisions: With data from more than 65,000 hotels, updated every hour, Pricing Manager ensures your rates are competitive 24/7, boosting both occupancy and revenue. 

When used together, these tools allow you to manage your hotel’s pricing and availability with ease, giving you more time to focus on key priorities. In fact, you’ll save up to 50% more time setting prices and you can increase revenue by up to 20%. 

No more scrambling before a new event or worrying about unsold rooms. With Pricing Manager and Channel Manager working seamlessly in the background, you’ll always have the right rates set, your availability perfectly managed, and more time to focus on delivering a memorable guest experience.

Ready to set the right price every time?

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.