This article explains why adjusting your price by 'lead time to booking' could be a good idea and how to toggle them in the RoomPriceGenie app.
The 'Lead Time Adjustment' feature
The RoomPriceGenie algorithm will always try to position you relative to the market to sell your remaining rooms. But sometimes, you may want to use a different strategy for the market or the RoomPriceGenie algorithm.
Lead time adjustments mean you can make pricing adjustments in percentage terms, depending only on the time left to arrival. This means you can use strategies like being cheaper for early bookers, for example. Lead time adjustments can be both positive and negative.
NOTE: Lead time adjustments do not override your minimum and maximum prices.
Lead Time Adjustments page in the RoomPriceGenie app
Here are some examples of when to use Lead time adjustments:
Example 1: You may want to sell your remaining rooms at almost any price to avoid empty rooms. In this case, you may want to go even cheaper than we suggest for the last couple of days. You could adjust to going 10% lower on the last day.
Example 2: You may want to charge more for bookings 3 months out as you find the early bookers are less price-sensitive. Here you could make a 5% increase for all prices from 3 months onwards.
Example 3: You may notice that your competitors reduce their prices 2 weeks before people arrive. You could preempt this by reducing prices from 4 weeks to 2 weeks before. Then you get more bookings before your competitors reduce. You could then charge more closer to booking time as you already have higher occupancy.
- For example, you may want to reduce prices additionally 4-6 weeks before guest arrival to get more bookings in that window.
- Navigate to the Pricing Strategy in the navigation bar.
- Go to Lead Time.
- Click in the field of the lead time to booking you would like to modify and type in the percentage change you would like to apply. These can be positive and negative.
- All these steps can be observed below:
we are currently in the process of updating our knowledge base to the new UI. We appreciate your understanding in case you still see an outdated display. Nonetheless, the step-by-step guide will remain the same.
How can you use Lead Time Adjustments to your advantage?
Lead time adjustments work so that we adjust your pricing more at a certain time before arrival. Note that we will not override minimum and maximum prices here.
For Example: if you put -10 in the box of 4-7 days, then prices would be reduced by 10% for every night that is between 4 and 7 days in the future.
Here are some ways that we have seen Lead Time Adjustments used:
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Option 1: Increase prices in the last couple of days
Many hoteliers have increased their prices in the last few days as they don’t like to reduce as much as the hotels around them. To do so, add plus values in the last couple of days.
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Option 2: Decrease prices on the last couple of days
If you believe that RoomPriceGenie has not decreased the prices enough in the last couple of days, and if you like to go low regardless of your occupancy, then you may like to consider adding additional lead-time adjustments and adding minus values.
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Option 3: Use lead-time adjustments with your early booking strategy
Some hotels like to start their prices lower to get some bookings in early. Alternatively, they may make prices lower 2-4 weeks before arrival to try to get bookings in the period before other hotels start reducing prices (often about 2 weeks out).
Here is an example of a hotel giving lower prices for people who book more than 3 months in advance.
NOTE: Please never forget to click on Save after making a change.