US: Expedia has launched Rev+, a revenue management tool for serviced apartment operators and hoteliers.
Expedia‘s Partner Central division says it will offer the product free to properties that are already part of its distribution network on sites such as Expedia, Hotels.com and Venere. The system allows hotels to gauge their rates against competitors over the course of 90 days, alongside other market factors.
Features include a forecasting tool which allows properties to view demand for a market based on data captured across the portfolio of Expedia brands, while a notification system will alert hotels to changes to rates over the course of the last 24 hours. Rev+ will initially be available in the US, with other regions to follow.
Cyril Ranque, president of lodging partner services at Expedia, said: “The industry is investing in technology to bring traffic to their brand websites and convert customers and process payments, but they have to invest on both web and mobile technologies across multiple platforms and most likely with a sub-scale result because these aren’t technology companies,” he said. “We can adapt the technology that we develop at a fairly reasonable market cost to us and make it available for the industry in order to make the industry more efficient at optimising the customer journey and hotels’ efforts to reach consumers. There’s a global opportunity here to increase efficiencies and reduce costs for hotel owners and operators while also generating new sources of revenue for the industry.”
On the Horizon
“We definitely feel that we can help our hotel partners increase their RevPAR and these are areas where you can expect to see us rolling out new products over the next six to 12 months,” Ranque said. “Travel is growing two times faster than GDP, but while there’s more demand, it’s fragmented across multiple channels, countries and payment methods. So it’s not easy to capture that demand and our role is to provide an efficient marketplace for consumers to find the best product for their trip and for our partners to connect with those consumers,” he added.
Ranque is a member of the advisory board for Serviced Apartment Summit Americas, which recently met in Washington DC to plan the 2017 event.
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