Optimand leverages event data to increase direct bookings for luxury hotel groups
Since integrating PredictHQ data into their platform, Optimand has seen a 100% increase in revenue
Use Case
Demand Forecasting, Dynamic Pricing
Industry
Accommodation, Technology
Products & Features
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Introducing Optimand: A game-changer in the hospitality industry since 2016
With its pioneering real-demand analytics and business intelligence, Optimand revolutionized the industry, addressing the lack of a comprehensive intelligence platform for accommodation businesses. By seamlessly integrating hotel room web searches into revenue management models and predictive analytics, Optimand provides hotels with the data and tools they need to improve website performance and drive more conversions.
Led by CEO & Co-Founder Giuseppe Paolelli, Optimand started out with a focus on three crucial factors that drive hospitality demand and business intelligence:
Events: Local attended events such as concerts, sports, conferences, and more typically have a direct impact on booking rates and inventory for centrally-located hotels.
Pickup vs last year: The amount of rooms booked or money generated by a hotel on a certain date compared to that same date last year, which indicates future demand.
Pricing trends: The patterns and shifts in a hotel’s room rates over time, caused by seasonal variations, demand fluctuations caused by events, and adaptations in reaction to competitor rates or economic conditions.
What was missing from this formula was the booking intention, which Optimand integrated by correlating live web searches for hotel rooms. Combining events, pickup versus last year, pricing trends, and live web searches was the key to unlocking higher conversions in the space.
To create a user-friendly platform, Optimand integrates various data sources with live web searches, and provides tools to help drive profitability. Serving major hotel brands globally, Optimand continues to innovate with new capabilities, such as enabling users to trigger secret booking rates based on user behavior and several preselected criteria. This allows precise audience targeting, shifting demand from third parties to direct channels. Unlike other web analytics platforms, Optimand enables personalized offers for individual site visitors before they make bookings, maximizing conversions and revenue. The outcome is a distinctive platform that is tailored for the hospitality industry that provides demand insights to some of the largest hotel brands across the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Taking hotel business intelligence to the next level with intelligent event data
What Optimand and PredictHQ had in common is that customers from both companies hold invaluable information that was not properly being tracked. Through the global impact of the pandemic, both companies understood how this information—if captured at the right moment—can impact profitability immediately. As Paolelli notes, integrating intelligent event data was a critical step in unlocking their platform’s full potential.
Users can access PredictHQ event data within the Optimand platform in a variety of ways, such as a list of events, a map, a heat map, a list of clustered events, and more – so you can easily see the correlation between your demand, and local events.
With insight into historical and future events, Optimand users are able to compare peak demand periods with events taking place, and use this data to enhance their targeted marketing, digital campaigns, and personalized offers. For example, platform users can refer to the calendar view to take a quick glance at a variety of different metrics at once:
Let’s say you’re a revenue manager who wants to see what the demand is for a room on July 14, 2023. Within the Optimand platform, you have access to:
Website Demand: How many people have searched for a room for that night in particular
Website Rooms Sold: How many of these people searching actually converted
PMS Rooms Pickup: The number of rooms sold over the last two weeks in the property management system, from third party websites, and your own booking system
Pricing Trends: How competitor pricing has been moving over a designated period of time
Event Impact: The number of people attending events on a given night
This information is used not only to confirm different variables that explain what’s actually happening around the hotel, but once events are announced, you can also further explore the correlation between events and demand for your hotel rooms.
Looking at the events calendar six months ahead of time is the best way to proactively adjust rates and confirm the optimal rates as major event dates approach. Even if your property won’t see increased bookings as a result of an upcoming event, you can still anticipate events to impact your inventory levels as the event dates get closer. In other words, on nights with events, your rate will still be higher than usual – because there are thousands more event attendees in town compared to a night where there are no events taking place.
Results
While it’s one of many variables that contributes to their success, and that of their customers, intelligent event data is a key element to the Optimand platform. Since integrating PredictHQ data into their new dashboards, Optimand has seen a massive increase in forecasted growth over the past year:
Since integrating PredictHQ data into their platform, Optimand has seen a 100% increase in revenue
The importance of customized data for major hotel groups
Serving a client base of 4 and 5 star hotel groups across the globe means Optimand’s typical customer has several different departments within their organization, each with various personas that need different data points to best perform their duties. It’s been key for Optimand to provide ways for different functions, such as ecommerce, marketing, revenue operations, and more to be able to personalize dashboards depending on what type of data they want to see.
For example, a digital marketing manager can pick their hotel, and simply drag and drop the different elements to include in a custom dashboard to quickly identify:
How many inquiries come in from certain marketing channels
Booking intent, or the number of searches for a hotel room on a certain night
Qualified demand for target periods
And much more
Using Optimand, you’d also be able to trigger dedicated rate codes for selected referrals and UTM campaigns, then use personalized offers to increase conversions. For example, you can create campaigns with pricing for users from Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Meanwhile, a revenue manager may want to assemble a completely different dashboard with data points more relevant to their department goals. Armed with this insight, hotels globally are making data-driven decisions, including:
Protecting high-demand nights by increasing minimum lengths of stay
Activating and deactivating promotions on their website based on booking thresholds
Increasing bookings by targeting specific customers with custom room rates
Boosting ad spend such as paid social media and Google ads for slow months in advance
Immediately monitoring whether marketing campaigns are generating revenue for the stay period as soon as campaigns are launched
In the dynamic world, real-time event visibility is key
Responding quickly to event announcements is essential, as the window of opportunity is very narrow. With just a 24-hour window to react, the ability to identify and quickly act on events that will impact pricing and demand is the difference between a wildly profitable night, and a hotel fully booked with under-priced rooms.
The opportunity of local events represents tens of thousands of dollars in revenue hotels can earn on a given night – which for accommodation providers in busy cities, represents countless opportunities each year. By surfacing detailed event insights in their platform, Optimand is helping their users capitalize on every opportunity.
Access to the right data gives hotel operators the confidence to act on what’s happening around them. As recovery continues around the world and demand bounces back to pre pandemic levels, PredictHQ data gives them the necessary insight to more effectively price and plan. Optimand plans to continue powering data-driven decisions for the accommodation industry by merging new datasets and developing new strategic partnerships – enabling even more granular web analytics for accommodation providers.
