What is RoomPriceGenie?
RoomPriceGenie is a third-party revenue management solution which can be used to dynamically price your rooms on any given day, based around several parameters.
- Market factor reflects trends seen in changes to other properties' availability and pricing.
- Occupancy / pickup factor reflects the changes to occupancy at your own property.
You can also set property specific adjustments, for example if you know you are always busier on Saturday and quieter on Sunday you could set those days to have an offset from the otherwise recommended pricing. Similarly, you can enter any monthly variations to reflect seasonal changes.
RoomPriceGenie uses all of this data to then suggest the optimal price for your rooms to be sold at, within floor and ceiling prices that you can configure for each room type. That data is pushed back to Caterbook and can then be used for your internal pricing, the web booking engine and also for your OTA's.
Remember that RoomPriceGenie works in two ways:
- Increases pricing on days when demand is high.
- Increases occupancy on days when demand is low by reducing prices.
Whilst there is obviously a monthly cost for RoomPriceGenie itself, our integration to it is included with your monthly Caterbook license fee.
Getting started.
If you are interested in working with this integration and taking advantage of a two week free trial period, please raise a support ticket in the first instance and we will forward your contact details to our partnership team at RoomPriceGenie to ensure a smooth onboarding process.
Pre-integration setup.
One Caterbook Rate Plan will be selected to be sent to RPG, and this is known as the reference rate. It is recommended that this be your cheapest non-discounted "regular" rate - usually a Room Only rate or B&B rate, rather than a Non-refundable or Advance purchase one.
The room types set up in RoomPriceGenie must be configured to have the same occupancy rules as the corresponding Room Types for the reference Rate Plan in Caterbook. You can check these from the Price plans screen of your reference rate, by clicking the notepad & pencil icon on each Room Type row.
For the 'dbl' room type below, the Caterbook 'Adults Included' value is '1', so the RPG 'Default occupancy' value is '1'.
Caterbook allows for one 'Extra Adult', so the RPG 'Max Occupancy' is '2', with a +£10 offset here for the additional person.
For the 'sup dbl' room type below, the Caterbook 'Adults Included' value is '2', so the RPG 'Default occupancy' value is '2'.
Caterbook allows for no 'Extra Adults' here, so the RPG 'Max Occupancy' is also '2', with no increment for additional guests.
Also, because RoomPriceGenie is now handling the pricing recommendations, you should remove any Dynamic Pricing rules in Caterbook, for all Room Types and all Rate Plans where you'll be using the RoomPriceGenie pricing. Wherever there's a blue hourglass icon, click it and reset all the values to zero.
RoomPriceGenie's own support team will help you in configuring all of their settings for your property.
Setting up the integration.
Once you have your RoomPriceGenie account set up and configured, please raise a support ticket requesting that we activate this feature for you. We'll need your Client ID and Client Secret, which can be found in RoomPriceGenie under Account Settings > Integration.
RoomPriceGenie's accuracy is dependent on having the correct count of the number of rooms that have been sold. We handle the following Caterbook features as follows:
Multi-mapped rooms: Where a physical room is mapped as more than one Room Type (e.g., sgl, dbl & twin) it's important that you tell us which Room Type you want the room to be set as for RoomPriceGenie. We will then configure the 'RPG Default Type' feature to ensure it isn't 'counted' more than once.
Virtual Rooms: A room made up of more than one physical room is already being accounted for and so won't be included again in the data sent to RoomPriceGenie.
We'll then Sync the required data to RoomPriceGenie. Then, once that has completed, under Pricing Strategy > Rooms Setup, you can map each Caterbook Room Type to the corresponding one in RoomPriceGenie.
The Sync Out logs for RoomPriceGenie in Caterbook will show three Manual Sync entries. The 'inventory.response' message contains the 'number_of_rooms' value for each room type that the property has. Adding them together gives the total number of rooms at the property - in the case of our test account it's 6 (dbl) + 3 (twn) + 6 (sup dbl) = 15 in total. The figure we've sent is also shown as the 'Rooms in PMS' figure for each Room Type in the previous screenshot.
Evaluation period.
It's likely you'll want to fine tune the settings in RoomPriceGenie over a few days, to ensure the suggested pricing changes are within your expectations. Initially, the pricing suggestions will be pushed back to Caterbook but won't be used anywhere. You can view these in the RoomPriceGenie portal, but also from the RoomPriceGenie menu item under Pricing in Caterbook.
You'll see above that for 'Today', Tuesday 6th, with 10 of our rooms being sold and therefore 5 remaining, the price is lower than the previous Caterbook reference (B&B) price as we have a last chance to sell them. On Friday 9th (also with 10 sold) the price is higher than Caterbook's B&B price, possibly due to higher local demand going into the weekend.
Going live.
When you are happy to start using the suggested RoomPriceGenie pricing, let us know and we will activate the feature for you. By default, the RoomPriceGenie pricing will only affect pricing for the reference rate, in this case Bed & Breakfast.
If you have existing Caterbook Rate Plans that are derived from the reference rate, these won't automatically inherit their pricing from the new RoomPriceGenie prices. This gives you a degree of control over any special rates like Dinner, Bed and Breakfast, which you might be less inclined to have controlled by RoomPriceGenie initially, until you trust the process.
With the feature active, RoomPriceGenie now becomes an option to be the source of any derived pricing.
Please bear in mind that if your other (non-reference) rates are not already derived in Caterbook from another rate, but have stand-alone, manually entered pricing, if you were to then derive them from the suggested RoomPriceGenie pricing, the manually entered values will be overwritten.
For this reason, we suggest that during your 2 week free trial, you only work with the reference rate and do not derive any other rates from RoomPriceGenie until you are certain that you intend to proceed beyond the initial 2 week trial period.