I build & manage unique hotels with the highest returns in hospitality. Learn how to grow your vision and go from commodity STRs to boutique hotels.
[TWIH]: AI agents will cancel and rebook your guests
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Before this week's episode: Slow season gets decided 60 to 120 days out. Most hotels are still solving it 30 days out, cutting rates alongside everyone else.
My Baya co-founder Steve, Katarina Glejtkova (our Director of Revenue Management at Oasi) and I are running a free 90-minute workshop on Zoom on how to price early, and stop joining your competitors in a race to the bottom.
Join us on October 7 Wednesdsay at 1PM EST. Save your seat here. Hey, Ben here! Edwin, Zach and I kept landing on the same thing this week: 50% of travelers already use AI in their booking process. Now AI agents are about to do something OTAs never could: keep shopping around for you after you book. And they all want a cut of your bookings. Hilton's CIO, Michael Leidinger, said AI assistants put Booking.com and Expedia under real threat.In DC's Destination AI conference, Leidinger predicted the agents will want commission too. And they'll keep shopping after the guest books, cancelling and rebooking every time your rate drops. Booking Holdings answered with Lola, a new AI assistant from Kayak co-founders Steve Hafner and Paul English. It sells preferred hotel rates on a $5 or $25 monthly membership with a 12-month lock-in. And Choice Hotels paid a reported $130 million for Harvest Hosts. That buys 500,000 RVers who already pay roughly $100 to $179 a year to park overnight at wineries and farms. This is all about demand capture. If most of your bookings still come through someone else's front door, this episode is for you.In this week's episode, we cover...
So what do IHG and Wyndham do now? Click here to watch this week's full episode of This Week in Hospitality.Enjoy. Ben Wolff |
Ben Wolff | The Unique Stays Guy
I build & manage unique hotels with the highest returns in hospitality. Learn how to grow your vision and go from commodity STRs to boutique hotels.
Which pricing strategy should you use? Option A: Manually set your rate and leave it. Option B: Use a dynamic pricing tool to adjust your rates automatically based on the market. Now, this is a bit of a trick question because the right answer I'm looking for is… You should be working towards a Custom Revenue Management System. Why? If you manually set your rate, you’d better hope you can time the market right. Otherwise, you’ll probably end up: Pricing too low and maxing occupancy (with a...
Over the past few weeks, we've begun sitting down with Accelerator members to look back at their first five months with us. Across the board, one lesson keeps coming up: Pricing. More specifically… How to price so that ADR goes up and occupancy goes up with it How to set prices when you don't have a booking history to lean on So today, I want to walk you through one member who figured it out. They opened five cabins in April, in a North Carolina mountain town most travelers haven't heard of,...
Quick note before we get into it: I'm hosting a live workshop tomorrow, October 1st at 1:00 PM EST on The Slow Season Pricing Playbook: How To Price With AirDNA Adapt. In just 90 minutes, we’ll show you how to build a competitive comp set and price strategically against your closest competitors. Click here to add this workshop to your calendar (and we’ll send you the replay - even if you can’t make it live). Last Thursday, I was catching up with a friend who’s attending VRMA 26 in Nashville...