An In-Depth Guide to Pricing Intelligence Software for Entertainment Businesses

More than 90% of shoppers compare prices before deciding what to buy. That’s true whether they’re comparing hotel room offers or shopping for retail goods.

With the tourism boom that’s followed the recent Covid-19 pandemic, setting the right prices for hotel rooms and entertainment services is more important than ever.

One way to set accurate prices is to use pricing intelligence software. This software helps you monitor and analyze price trends in the market, as well as understand those trends and use the information you gain to make better pricing decisions.

This guide goes in-depth into what pricing intelligence software is, how it works, and its key features. It also goes over a couple of different tools that are taking off in the market and helping tourism and entertainment industry businesses stay competitive.

What is Price Intelligent Software?

To put it simply, price intelligent software is a type of software that helps businesses create accurate pricing schedules that appeal to customers. Pricing software typically uses data mining techniques for three main purposes:

• Monitoring
• Tracking
• Analysis

These actions are relevant in determining market price data, so you know how what you need to adjust to stay ahead. Price intelligent software is beneficial because it helps you make more data-driven and evidence-based pricing decisions rather than making decisions based on whims or gut feelings.

Beyond that, price intelligent software helps companies better understand current price data. The software enables you to analyze real-time price positions, allowing your company to keep up with sudden changes in pricing plans.

Pricing intelligence tools also help hoteliers stay proactive, giving clients the most optimal pricing model that suits what the hotels can offer. These tools are also the only way for hotels to make more accurate, smart, and data-driven pricing decisions. Plus, the software helps the hotel management’s staff have more time to deal with other time-consuming issues.

Other reasons why hotels can benefit from pricing intelligence tools include the following:

1. Determine real-time and advanced essential market demands in the hotel industry
2. Easily adjust room rates to maximize profitability
3. Understand and gauge whether your room pricing is competitive
4. Forecasting of long-range room rates
5. Establish better rules and regulations for adjusted price changes

Why are Pricing Intelligence Tools Important for Hotels?

Effective pricing management is essential for meeting client demand and keeping guests satisfied. It’s what lets guests feel that they’re receiving good value for money paid while also ensuring businesses are making a profit on each sale.

Pricing intelligence tools are useful for hotels in particular because they let these properties learn more about their guests and provide better experiences. Pricing software shows what the demand of guests is as well as what the corresponding supply is. This data lets hotels set accurate prices that meet client expectations and leave them satisfied.

On top of that, pricing intelligence tools take out the manual labor of gathering market data to set accurate prices. This leads to more accurate room pricing as well as reduced time and effort on the part of the staff. Once again, the end result is happier guests who are more satisfied with the value they receive for their money.

Additionally, pricing intelligence tools can help hotels identify pricing gaps that can lead to lost revenue. By identifying this type of waste, hotels are better able to set accurate prices that not only satisfy clients but don’t leave money on the table.

Price Intelligence Tools Now vs. Then

Before the innovation of price intelligence software that is famous today, databases, sheets, and paperwork were the name of the game. Companies had to stick to paper reports with different headings and titles, which can get confusing and inconvenient, especially when looking for key data sets.

Relying on pen and paper meant that it was impossible for hotels to work with the latest data, and there was a high chance of human error with calculations.

As a result, pricing systems were more likely to be inaccurate, which could, in turn, lead to reduced profitability instead of a boost in revenue.

Pricing has evolved over the years to move away from these manual pricing structures and move towards online technologies that automate many of these tasks. Additionally, these new systems typically involve gathering data from a wider range of sources, leading to more accurate pricing models. They also have encryptions and security settings in place to ensure sensitive information isn’t leaked to other companies.

Key Features of Price Intelligence Tools

The most relevant features of price intelligence tools include the following:

Let’s dive deeper into how these features can help your business.

Track Trends in Real-Time

Tracking real-time trends is essential in determining the minimum and maximum price ranges in the market for your hotel rooms and event seats. Tracking trends help you understand what supply and demand in the market is like, as well as look for ways that you can better position your hotel or event offerings to clients. Tracking real-time trends also help your business stay on top of your competitors.

Inventory Management

Thanks to pricing intelligence software, your company can achieve better inventory management. This involves maintaining and monitoring occupancy levels, allowing your company to optimize and generate better pricing strategies.

Good inventory management ensures you can meet client expectations, minimizing inventory-related expenses. Pricing intelligence software also allows companies to understand that inventory management within your property is influenced by multiple variables, including the following:

• Finances
• Suppliers of goods such as cleaning or breakfast supplies
• Lead time
• Room or seat type
• Internal teams

Outperform Competitors

Price intelligence tools help establish where you stand in the market. Pricing software lets you keep track of external factors so that you can make quick decisions about changing prices.

A few pieces of information that this type of feature can help you gather includes:

1. Promotions
2. Room and seat prices
3. Package offers
4. Upsell offerings
5. Discounts

Remember, although this can be useful to get a general feel for the state of the market, it shouldn’t be the only factor you use to set prices.

The reason for this is that competitor prices are often inaccurate or don’t make sense for your particular offering. However, you can still use this data to develop pricing schemes that do make sense for your industry. Remember, this data is a tool, not a crutch.

Accurate Product Matching

Accurate product matching helps you ensure that what you offer is priced fairly according to the value it offers clients. Aside from determining how to adjust your current rates, pricing intelligence tools also help you determine how to improve or descale your rooms according to value. It also helps you feel more confident about the decisions because they are more data-driven.

Extensive Product Coverage

Extensive product coverage means giving you well-researched and accurate data about the services you offer your guests. Pricing intelligence tools have extensive product coverage to ensure that it covers a long list of amenities you offer in the industry. For example, pricing intelligence tools can go beyond just room rates and can offer insights into different types of rooms, breakfast add-ons, upsell offerings, package deals, and more.

Ease of Use

The pricing intelligence tools in the software allows you to analyze, monitor, and track pricing and inventory in the market. Many of these software options track these changes automatically, meaning they run in the background and pull this information without any added effort on your part.

Pricing software also works on auto-pilot, updating prices and information around the clock. The result is that there’s no added effort on your part to look into what market changes have taken place that could affect your current rates.

Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing  allows companies to adjust and adapt their price plans to market conditions to make them more competitive. These actions are usually happening in real-time, meaning that as market conditions change, so do pricing systems.

Digital technologies, such as pricing intelligence software, have the ability to scan market conditions and update pricing systems according to the information gathered. This makes it much easier for companies to keep up with changing market conditions and stay ahead of the competition.

Inflation Tracking

One industry leader mentioned the importance of retailers staying up-to-date with price changes because of high inflation. As sellers, this allows you to protect your margins.

Inflation is one of the market trends tracked by the pricing intelligence tools because it enables you to understand the price adjustments that should be made to your product. It also helps with market awareness, which prioritizes price-margin protection.

Revenue Management Solutions That Optimize Pricing 24/7

From upsell opportunities to accurate price management, Luxe Pricing is here to maximize your revenue.

Learn More

How to Pick Pricing Intelligence Software

Let’s go over a few of the things to keep in mind when choosing software for pricing intelligence.

Prioritize Needs

Choosing the best pricing intelligence software for your business can get confusing. This is why it’s important always to know your needs and adapt from there.

Prioritizing your needs also makes looking for pricing intelligence software with all the key features easier.

A few key features you’ll want to look for in a pricing intelligence software include:

• Market insights and analysis: lets you make changes to your pricing depending on supply and demand and keeps you ahead of competing hotels

• Automated pricing: makes adjustments to your pricing schemes without having to do any manual input

• Profitability analysis: gives you insights into how well your rooms are performing and how much profit you’re generating at your current and previous price points
• Easy pricing adjustments: makes it easy to make changes to current pricing schemes and to update them according to analyses and insights gathered by the software

Looking for these features, among others, can ensure that you’re getting services that really help your hotel keep a competitive edge.

Consider Ease of Use

Anything digital is not always the easiest to use and manipulate, especially when your company has been used to dealing with paperwork, manual databases, handwritten documents, and spreadsheets.

When your company is always packed with work, you don’t have the luxury of time to browse through how-to videos and learn how to use the pricing intelligence software. This is why you must consider the software’s ease of use. It’s best to choose one that doesn’t have much of a learning curve.

When the software is easy to use, it’s easier for your employees to get on board and start leveraging the intelligence tools. This makes it faster for you to establish your competitors in the industry and generate ways how to be better.

Your Available Budget

Pricing intelligence software is going to be an investment. By contacting several companies and comparing their prices, you’ll be able to get a baseline as to how much pricing intelligence software meets your needs and costs.

From there, it’s important to also consider onboarding, training time, and migrating your current data to the new software as part of your budgeting consideration.

Top Pricing Intelligence Platform

Now that you have an overview of what the pricing intelligence software does and why it matters, it’s time to choose the best one for your company. We’ve also rounded up some of the top pricing intelligence platforms you can check for your brand.

Luxe Pricing

Luxe Pricing is all about improving the management of theaters, resorts, and hotels. The company helps business owners in the industry improve their state-of-the-art revenue for their overall profitability. The business currently offers two major software offerings, HouseCount RMS which is a pricing intelligence software, and Luxesell URS, a software used to upsell clients on your current offerings.

This SaaS company combines the following features in its two product offerings:

1. Optimization of real-time total profit
2. Modern feedback control
3. Automation
4. Artificial Intelligence

Revenue Management Solutions That Optimize Pricing 24/7

From upsell opportunities to accurate price management, Luxe Pricing is here to maximize your revenue.

Learn More

Luminate Market Price

Source

Another top-performing SaaS application is Luminate Market Price. Several companies rely on this software because it enables integrations with Azure and Microsoft to establish better interactions between price demands and changes.

Another key feature of Luminate Market Price is it allows continuous price optimization daily without compromising the research quality of its effects and costs. And it can also effectively work with start-up companies and brands running low on budget.

The other features of Luminate Market Price include the following:

• Increasing efficiency gains
• Decreasing write-off rates
• Making accurate predictions for price optimizations
• Optimizing lighter levels of KPIs
• Aligns with the company’s business strategies to improve overall operational stability

RateGain

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RateGain is another price tracking software, this one working to provide rate intelligence for more than just hotels. RateGain, instead, focuses on providing pricing information for every aspect of a traveler’s journey, ranging from flights and hotels to car rentals and cruise lines.

The company works by drawing information from websites and public sources that travelers actually use to make bookings. Then, it compiles that information in order to provide hoteliers with accurate price sensitivity and market conditions.

The other features of RateGain include the following:

• Automation and syncing
• Room type mapping
• Rate management
• Analytics and reporting

PROS

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PROS is most famous for its cloud-based solutions that can generate winning pricing strategies, accelerate sales, and align demands and availability. This SaaS software offers a customer-centric experience, allowing them to grow better revenue, generate modernized business processes, and sustain profitability.

There are three leading platforms on PROS: SellingPro, PricingPro, and RevenuePro.

• SellingPRO - generates a comprehensive set of configuration, eCommerce applications, and quoting
• PricingPRO - comes up with better pricing practice insights
• RevenuePRO - complete solution of selling and pricing for better overall revenue

Other features of PROS include the following:

• Merchandising and shopping
• Revenue management
• Salesforce CPQ
• Group sales
• Real-time dynamic pricing

Use Case: Optimizing Hotel Room Rates With Price Intelligence Software

The property management field, especially hotels, requires dynamic planning strategies to ensure optimal pricing. Relying on pricing intelligence tools can help these establishments adjust prices according to market trends, supply, and demand.

Let’s take a look at a use case for hotels to get a better picture of how pricing intelligence software can help hoteliers create competitive room rates that guests are more likely to book.

Real-time Changing of Online Hotel Room Rates

The best thing about pricing intelligence software like Housecount RMS is that it enables real-time tracking. You don’t have to stay in your office to check for emerging trends that demand price changes. All you need is the software’s interface, making monitoring your hotel’s pricing performance convenient.

The pricing intelligence software allows your hotel to change online hotel room rates based on dynamic pricing strategies.

Pinpointing Hotel Pricing Problems

What’s unique about pricing intelligence software is that in addition to giving you insights about market trends, it can also help you detect pricing problems. These problems can arise from your price points being less competitive or not at par with your customer’s price demands and expectations.

Automatically pinpointing these problems can help you change room prices immediately, leaving no room for missed profits.

Another way that pricing intelligence software can help you pinpoint pricing problems is that it allows you to conduct in-depth rates analysis. In-depth rate analysis allows you to compare your current price plans with your competitors. This means you can easily adjust pricing depending on how well your business is doing.

Reduce Gaps in Pricing Strategy

Besides just pinpointing hotel pricing problems, this technology can also help you reduce errors in current pricing schemes. Errors increase the risk of losing customers’ trust, making them look for a different option.

For example, pricing intelligence software can help you optimize hotel room rates that are priced way out of scope. These out-of-scope prices can lead to underselling and potential revenue being lost.

With pricing intelligence software, you can identify those out-of-scope prices and adjust them so that they’re more accurate to market conditions. The result is fewer pricing gaps and better revenue overall.

Gaining Reliable Pricing Analytics Insights

Finally, pricing intelligence software allows hoteliers to gain insights into current pricing analytics. In this way, they are able to compare prices and look for the best value ranges to ensure they offer their customers the most reasonable prices available.

Pricing analytics insights can include showing maximum and minimum market rates. This helps you improve your pricing elasticity. At the same time, it makes it easier for you to spot threats and opportunities in the market and respond to them accordingly.

Final Thoughts on Pricing Intelligence Software

Although pricing intelligence once meant manual spreadsheets, today, technology has allowed businesses to take advantage of intelligent software that makes it easy to set accurate, competitive prices.

Luxe Pricing offers a pricing intelligence software called HouseCount RMS that helps ensure you’re able to provide real-time and accurate pricing for rooms and seats. This software also helps you maximize revenue, all while providing an outstanding user experience that makes it easy to use and navigate.

If you’re operating in the hotel or entertainment industry, Luxe Pricing can help you keep up with competitors. Schedule a demo today to learn more about this software and how it can benefit your business.

Revenue Management Solutions That Optimize Pricing 24/7

From upsell opportunities to accurate price management, Luxe Pricing is here to maximize your revenue.

Learn More