HotelFlex Launches Fully Flexible Booking Model
One of the most frustrating elements of travelling has always been inflexible check-in and check-out times. Imagine you are flying in on the early morning flight. After a night with less sleep than normal, you arrive and all you want to do is head to your hotel room, shower and sleep. Only to be told at the front desk – “sorry check-in isn't until 3pm”. It's incredibly frustrating.
Hotels often have the spare inventory to offer the check-in if they are notified in advance, but there is no technology that allows hotels to know when their guests are arriving so that they can prioritize the cleaning of their rooms accordingly.
Enter HotelFlex - HotelFlex has developed a predictive analytics platform that analyses the last 6 months of a hotel's check-in and check-out data. From that they can forecast the actual occupancy of a hotel on an hour by hour basis on each day of the week.
HotelFlex then feeds that data up to a widget inserted into the hotels direct booking engine which offers guests flexible check-in and check-out times at the specific times the hotel can
accommodate.
For example, the software may learn that a particular hotel might always have 20% of rooms clean and empty at 10am on a Monday morning. HotelFlex would then add a confidence interval on top of that in order to avoid the risk of double bookings and offer, say, 10% of guests booking on a Monday the ability to check-in at 10am.
The FlexRate algorithm then calculates how much the guest should be charged for the additional flexibility based on demand and supply. They believe there's the opportunity to increase revenue on certain bookings by as much as 50%. And because there is no cost associated with that extra revenue, the room is already clean and empty they are simply letting the guest in a little early, that revenue is pure profit and passes directly to the bottom line.
Hotels often have the spare inventory to offer the check-in if they are notified in advance, but there is no technology that allows hotels to know when their guests are arriving so that they can prioritize the cleaning of their rooms accordingly.
Enter HotelFlex - HotelFlex has developed a predictive analytics platform that analyses the last 6 months of a hotel's check-in and check-out data. From that they can forecast the actual occupancy of a hotel on an hour by hour basis on each day of the week.
HotelFlex then feeds that data up to a widget inserted into the hotels direct booking engine which offers guests flexible check-in and check-out times at the specific times the hotel can
accommodate.
For example, the software may learn that a particular hotel might always have 20% of rooms clean and empty at 10am on a Monday morning. HotelFlex would then add a confidence interval on top of that in order to avoid the risk of double bookings and offer, say, 10% of guests booking on a Monday the ability to check-in at 10am.
The FlexRate algorithm then calculates how much the guest should be charged for the additional flexibility based on demand and supply. They believe there's the opportunity to increase revenue on certain bookings by as much as 50%. And because there is no cost associated with that extra revenue, the room is already clean and empty they are simply letting the guest in a little early, that revenue is pure profit and passes directly to the bottom line.