This article is the second part of the series of articles we’ll publish to go over HotelKey CRS functionality.

In lodging, a product is a combination of room type and rate plan that makes-up the guest reservation with the property. Last week, we covered the room type management. This week, we’ll cover BAR and discount rate plans that derive from the BAR as the amount on/off or percentage on/off. Next week, we’ll cover the fixed amount rate plans.

Rate management is as much an art as science. The rate of a specific room must justify the value based on the room attributes, property location, and market demand for the given date.The Best Available Rate (BAR) rate concept is one of the oldest concepts in Revenue Management to communicate the value of the stay to the guest. The amount of the daily BAR is either set by a revenue manager or determined by the RMS system that uses a set of attributes such as occupancy, last year’s data, weather, booking pace and seasonality among many other factors to suggest an optimal rate.

As per our internal statistics, on average, our HotelKey clients have 10+ discount rate plans that derive from the daily BAR rate. These rates are usually for online channels, stay or date-based discounts and membership programs (i.e. AAA).

Due to the nature of discount rate pricing, we believe the most optimal approach to derived rates is to be able to set the rate amount on/off OR percentage on/off for each date. It also enables the mix-and-match of derivation types (percentage or amount) for the same rate plan for each date. As a result, with HotelKey CRS, the revenue managers have full flexibility to allow discount rates to be changed for busy days or specific seasons to maximize the revenue opportunities.

For example, the revenue manager may set AAA to be 5% off BAR in the summer season, 10% off BAR in winter, $5 off BAR on Christmas Eve, $0 off BAR New Year Eve, etc.

In all of this, we also made it extremely simple to control these discount offsets. The user has a single-click screen to set the discount amount off/on or percentage off/on and the Rate engine automatically recalculates the discount values for those rate plans shopping API calls after the change

For more information, please visit this link for the how-to guide on the BAR and discount rate plans.