- Switching
Phil and Helen had inherited Eviivo as their booking software when they bought the business and continued with them for the first season, but decided to make a change for season two.
Robert McQuade is the CEO of McQuade Hotels in Glasgow. Having always embraced automation and new ideas to push his business forward, when the opportunity came up to trial Dynamic Pricing it was no surprise that McQuade Hotels were one of the first onboard.
In Robert’s own words…
“I knew very little about dynamic pricing prior to freetobook’s integration. In the past I managed my prices by basic pick-up reporting. I would have a look X amount of days/weeks/months/ years into the future and find out when my occupancy was growing and would flex my rate up the way. Closer to the time, I would start to flex my rate down the way.”
“Pick-up reporting was really time consuming and I knew that I just didn’t have the time to get the correct rate at my hotel, what I didn’t realise was that I was spending a lot of time and actually underselling myself.
My fear was that they were going to make it look good and get me my occupancy by lowering my rate but that has not been the case. The rates have come nowhere near my minimum rate. They’ve kept it up, surprisingly high and they can hold their nerve a lot better than I can because its personal to me, so I’m dropping my rate lower than they would have – they’re keeping the rate high, they’re holding their nerve because they’re a robot.
In the initial days there was part of me that wanted to jump in and lower the rate that the system was asking for, but time and time again, I was proved wrong by getting a higher rate than I would have been asking for.”
Setting up dynamic pricing was quick and easy – there was minimal input from me, therefore I haven’t actually had to use the support services. I’m quite impressed by how quickly the rates feed through to freetobook – it’s almost instant. The interface is absolutely seamless and user friendly. I have looked at some of the bigger dynamic pricing systems and there just looks to be so much faff involved in the set up and I think that was part of the reason why I was quite skeptical, bigger companies can use some jargon that goes right over a lot of our heads.
Now that I’ve subscribed I have the confidence to load rates 365 days in advance because the market factors are known, therefore even without any occupancy on my books, my rate is still reasonably high because it’s measuring the market.
We have been live with dynamic pricing for approximately 6-7 weeks now, we’ve had a positive impact on our ADR, our ADR is up 20% from 2 years ago (we weren’t able to use any data from the last couple of years because of covid) but I am absolutely delighted with that. If I could have achieved the same ADR as 2019 which was a very good year, I would have been happy – I didn’t expect 20% on top of that.
You do save a lot of time thinking on rate management – prior to it I didn’t give enough time because I had other things to do, in house things that I have to do within the hotels. It’s still probably saving me a couple of hours every single day, allowing me to be more
hands on with my businesses now and actually speak more directly to the customers rather than being hidden away in the back office.
Overall, its definitely something I would encourage all hoteliers to do. If I could go back in time, this is something I would have done many years ago.
UPDATE: In the 4 months that followed, ADR has increased by 43%+ and occupancy has actually been slightly higher than 2019.
If I was still doing the rates myself I wouldn’t be flexing my rates so aggressively, I’d be up but probably be up but just by a fraction not by 43%+ – it’s quite a staggering increase.”
Robert McQaude, CEO McQuade Hotels Limited
