Carlson Hotels Worldwide to Support its Stay Night Automated Pricing Initiative
Carlson Hotels Worldwide has selected JDA Software Group, Inc.'s new Travel Price Optimizer to provide daily pricing decisions for more than 700 properties in the United States and Asia Pacific as the foundation of the Carlson Hotels Stay Night Automated Pricing initiative. Carlson Hotels operates in 74 countries under the brands Regent Hotels & Resorts, Radisson Hotels & Resorts, Park Plaza Hotels & Resorts, Country Inns & Suites By Carlson and Park Inn.
JDA's new Travel Price Optimizer, a pricing solution architected using the JDA Enterprise Architecture, was designed to serve the needs of travel, transportation and hospitality companies. It optimizes prices based on competitive rates, capacity constraints, local market demand, and economic and company factors.
JDA's new Travel Price Optimizer, a pricing solution architected using the JDA Enterprise Architecture, was designed to serve the needs of travel, transportation and hospitality companies. It optimizes prices based on competitive rates, capacity constraints, local market demand, and economic and company factors.
"Two years ago, we embarked on a process of redefining revenue optimization for our hoteliers. Our research showed that the capabilities offered by established revenue management systems were no longer relevant to our hotels or the industry. We worked with JDA to develop the Carlson Hotels Stay Night Automated Pricing (SNAP) process. While traditional revenue management focuses on restricting the availability of discount products, the SNAP process optimizes pricing in order to maximize revenue through demand forecasting. This is a completely different strategy and with JDA's new solution we will be able to address this business challenge for our hotels," says Paula Winkler, executive vice president, operational support service and chief information officer for Carlson Hotels Worldwide
Pricing is the biggest driver
"We are convinced the Carlson Hotels SNAP process is the right one for our hoteliers," says Winkler. SNAP is designed to address three major shortcomings Carlson Hotels identified in the current breed of Revenue Management systems:
- Traditional Revenue Management systems depend too heavily on busy nights for their benefits. Carlson Hotels wanted to help its hotels make profitable pricing decisions on all stay nights, not just the busy ones.
- Carlson Hotels trains its hotels to understand their markets and their competitors' prices. Traditional Revenue Management systems have too little insight into competitor pricing. SNAP puts competitor data at the heart of its forecasting and price recommendation process.
- Carlson Hotels saw an opportunity to reduce the workload for end users significantly. To do this, it partnered with JDA to design a new business process in which JDA handles more complexity, so that the end-user process is simpler.