Continuing to address the various sources of data that are available to hoteliers to gather important information for decision-making, I now look at prices - especially those that consumers have access to online . As previously mentioned, along with social reputation and location, price is one of the main factors influencing hotel purchases. For this reason, it is important that hoteliers have a clear perspective of their hotel's positioning in relation to its competitors, whether in relation to its competitive set (CS) or the prices charged in its region against other competing regions.

The internet allows customers to have access - anywhere, at any time - to the prices charged by a hotel unit for a specific future date, catering to a stay with certain characteristics. This allows them to compare prices between various distributors (including the hotel itself), but also allows the hotel to more easily evaluate the prices charged by its competitors. From this last perspective, it is important, however, to mention that the systematic recording of prices practiced by your CS for a future period (such as the next 365 days), to be done manually, can be a daunting task, especially if we have in mind says that nowadays most hotel units apply some type of revenue management and, as such, are constantly changing their prices. Furthermore, tactics and control measures are constantly being defined that have an impact on prices – such as minimum stay limits, days without arrivals, days without departures, among others. Although some heuristics can be created to minimize the task of recording prices for future dates - such as, for example, daily, only recording the prices of double rooms in your CS for the next 15 days; and then, weekly, record the prices of CS double rooms for stays of 3 nights and 5 nights, for arrivals on 21, 30, 45, 60, 90 and 120 days - even so, this systematic, manual recording is complex , time-consuming and prone to errors.

Fortunately, nowadays there are numerous rate shopping tools that allow you to define a CS and price update deadlines, some of them even allowing you to create alarms and inform when prices for certain days exceed certain limits ; or when, for example, sales are closed or opened for a specific date. Another advantage that these tools offer is the possibility of exporting this data, or obtaining it programmatically , which allows it to be used in more complex analyses, including fusion with data from other sources to better understand the relationship between the variables and from there understand, for example, the impact that price and social reputation can have on the occupancy rate of the hotel unit, among other situations.

The truth is that as the Hotel Industry is an industry with a global presence, where today customers have easy access to price comparison tools (such as Trivago, Momondo, Skyscanner, among others), the hotelier can only survive if he has access to the same type of tools. Only in this way will you be able to truly understand your positioning and, at the same time, measure the impact of your pricing policy on your value proposition.

‍