How Hoteliers Achieved a 10% RevPar Increase with HQ revenue
Adding PredictHQ into HQ revenue data sources helped them achieve an average increase of 10% RevPar for their cutomers.
Introducing HQ revenue
HQ revenue is a software platform that provides real-time market data on rates and demand of online booking channels to hotels and hostels.
Launched in 2012, the Berlin-based company helps hoteliers and revenue managers stay competitive in a dynamic market by providing accurate marketing intelligence so they can optimize their strategies around pricing and distribution. This requires a lot of high-quality data.
The platform aggregates a variety of different data points—including room rates, hotel reviews, weather, and events. HQ revenue use this to populate different software modules that guide their customers how to yield their inventory for maximum revenue. Their goal is to provide hotels around the world with the best real-time data to make the best revenue decisions.
Adding PredictHQ into their data sources has improved their speed of global expansion and helped them achieve an average increase of 10% revenue per available room (RevPar) for their customers.
HQ revenue grappled with event data
HQ revenue were struggling to quickly collect high-quality, global data, slowing the ambitious expansion plans outside of Germany down. Reliable, high-quality data is at the heart of the product, and it was simply unrealistic to serve other markets based on how they were collecting data — which was all manual. Event data was a particularly time-consuming and frustrating challenge — think sporting matches, conferences, and festivals. But it was a key data set for their customers, so HQ revenue had to find a way.
The process of collecting event data is laborious and frustrating. The team was pulling data manually, scraping events from different sources, and cross-checking everything. "We were building a product that we knew was needed in the market but was going to fail if we didn't spend time on the quality of the data." HQ revenue’s Head of Product, Sven Blaurock, says.
“Initially this was fine, as we were just focused on Germany and were signing around 5-10 customers per month, but as we saw traction in the market and looked to expand, there was no way we were going to continue with the status quo.”
In working with their customers, PredictHQ has found that it takes a minimum of 15 minutes to capture one event, and in Germany alone, we see 14,000 plus events per month.
In order for HQ revenue to grow their business and knock on the doors of the big hotel chains, most of which have properties outside of Germany, it was taking significantly more time for the team to find event data in other countries. They were less familiar with the events in other countries. It took even more manual steps to research the key venues, the venue size, and the events that were going to be held in those venues. Ultimately, the Berlin team had no real insight into key event activity outside of Germany.
Event data plays a significant role as events can have a massive impact on the number of people who come into town and need a place to stay. HQ revenue knew that if they were going to succeed beyond Germany, they needed a more scalable, less-manual way to collect it.
HQ revenue invests in demand intelligence
Blaurock and the team spent months looking for an answer before they found PredictHQ. PredictHQ’s easy-to-use event API gave HQ revenue direct access to real-world event data, verified from billions of data points every day. Every event is cleansed, filtered, enriched, verified, and then ranked with proprietary technology. PredictHQ enabled the HQ revenue team to save significant time by eliminating all manual work so they can focus on the bread and butter of their business—rate shopping.
What HQ revenue found particularly unique about PredictHQ was the enrichment of the event data. Elements such as geodata are crucial. Geodata enables the team to ingest location-based data that is accurate and crucial for their customers. They can plot location from latitude and longitude, venue name, and venue address. The city population is also crucial to the HQ revenue team as the expected demand changes are dramatic depending on the size of the city that the event is being held in.
Finally, PredictHQ’s intelligent rankings of events based on predicted impact were something the team had never seen before with event data but has now become critical in what they surface to customers. The HQ revenue team is particularly excited to integrate one of PHQs newest ranks, Aviation Rank™ into their platform. HQ revenue plans to use the demand intelligence tool to reliably identify the volume of additional flight bookings an event will cause — which in turn correlates to the volume of people from out of town who will need accommodations.
Enriched and intelligent data equals less time required researching, scraping and adding insights on their end.
Blue Nimarom is the Lead Account Manager at HQ revenue and is responsible for ensuring customers are happy with the platform. She uses PredictHQ’s Premium Plan regularly to interpret event data and enable customers to make strategic decisions around pricing for spikes in demand.
The most valuable data enrichment for Nimarom is recurring events — which is when PredictHQ surfaces up information around high impact events that occur each year. Many recurring events change location each time they take place – so there may be a huge demand spike for a hotel in one city, but next time it will be in a different city, impacting different hotels. This is where the real value is realized by hotels. This means one team might be updating the pricing for additional demand that never materializes, while the team in the new location of the event will likely miss the demand spike. Nimarom shares, “Hotels have a product with an expiration date. When you make the wrong decisions around a big event, that can cause thousands of dollars in missed revenue.”
Results
HQ revenue customers experience a time savings of up to 90% by eliminating manual searching and analyzing
Adding PredictHQ into HQ revenue data sources helped them achieve an average increase of 10% RevPar for their cutomers.
Customers increased their revenue per available room (RevPar) by 10% on average when using their software, which includes PHQ event data
Nimarom, Blaurock, and the entire HQ revenue team have been able to accelerate their expansion to countries around the world and improve their software from PredictHQ’s event data over the last two years. Their goal is to provide hotels around the world with the best real-time data to make the best revenue decisions is now a reality.
HQ revenue can set up a customer account with personalized data in minutes compared to days and the overall speed to international expansion increased. HQ revenue now serves customers globally.
