Dynamic Rates & Online Inventory
Dynamic Rates
Dynamic Rates gives you the flexibility to change your rates easily for any given night. There may be a major event nearby, allowing you to increase your rates, or you might be a bit quiet and want to decrease your rates. As soon as you change your rates on the Dynamic Rates screen, everywhere you publish your rates will be updated.
The Dynamic Rates screen, by default, only shows the Dynamic Rate. You can optionally display the Minimum Nights Stay, Close to Depart & Close to Arrive options.
If you want to alter your rate for a specific night (up or down), just type the new rate into the cell. You will notice the cell will change to light blue, indicating that a Dynamic Rate is overriding the Standard Rate. You can also 'Stop Sell' a rate on a specific night by clicking the 'Stop Sell' button (white square with red border next to rate). If you Stop Sell a rate, it will appear on your online booking page as “Call” and appear as “Sold” or “Call” on your sales channels (depending on the channel, requires a Channel Manager connection).
By default, your minimum night stay is set when you create your Standard Rates. If the 'Minimum Nights' cell on the Dynamic Rates screen has a white background, this indicates that the Standard Rate Minimum Nights is in use. If you change the nights, the cell will have a light blue background, indicating you have adjusted the Minimum Nights for that night.
To move to different dates, you can click ‘Prev 7 Days’, ‘Next 7 Days’ or select a specific date. Also, if a cell has an orange border, it means there are no rooms left for that night.
If you want to update multiple dates, you can use the Bulk Rate Update screen. This lets you select a date range, rate types, and days of the week. Once you have made your selection, you can:
Set Rate: Increase/decrease by a fixed amount or increase/decrease by a percentage, set to a specific amount or reset back to the Standard Rate
Set Minimum Nights: To a specific value
Reset Minimum Nights: Back to the Standard Rate’s Minimum Nights
Stop Sell: To turn Stop Sell On or Off
Close to Depart: To turn Stop Sell On or Off
Close to Arrive: To turn Stop Sell On or Off
For example, you could set the minimum stay to 2 nights for every Friday night on your Queen Rooms between 3/5/2022 and 3/6/2022. Click 'Apply Changes' to update GuestPoint®.
GuestPoint® has a Web Rate Safety Limit that protects you against accidentally setting a really low rate (e.g. $1 instead of $100). If GuestPoint® detects that a rate will be published online at a rate lower than your Web Rate Safety Limit, it will swap the low rate for your safety limit rate (e.g. 50% off rack rate) and send you an email to let you know the Web Rate Safety Limit was reached, so that you can correct it. The Web Rate Safety Limit is set up in the Property Configuration in the Setup Tab.Online Inventory
The Online Inventory tab is the only place you need to go to manage your inventory online. The reason you need to manage this is that the Internet is not perfect. If you are using multiple online sales channels (e.g. Expedia, Last Minute, Hotel.com) and you have one room left, it is listed on all sites. It is possible to sell the same room across each site at the same time and end up with an overbooking. The easiest way to overcome this is for you to hold back some rooms from sale online using an Inventory Reserve. This gives you a buffer against over bookings.
For each day and room type, you can adjust the way your inventory is released online by adjusting the Inventory Reserve. The Default Online Inventory Reserve that is used for each room type is setup in the Room Type setup.
As the specific date gets closer, you may want to start reducing the reserve. Ultimately, you want to sell all your rooms and have no overbookings. One strategy is to start bringing your cheapest rooms back to a 0 Inventory Reserve first. If you end up with an overbooking in your cheapest room, you can upgrade the guest to a higher category.
To understand how simple managing your Online Inventory is, let’s go through an example:
On 24 April in our Basic Queen room we have the following:
Total number of Basic Queen rooms available is 11 (number in shaded cell)
The Inventory Reserve is 1 (number in white cell) and this comes from our Room Type setup
Therefore the Online Inventory is 10 (11 available – 1 reserve) (number in green cell)
This means that the number of Basic Queen rooms available across all of our online sites for April 24 is 10 rooms.
Now, we have just taken a new booking for a Basic Queen Room for 24 April.
The total number of Basic Queen Rooms Available has automatically dropped to 10, the Inventory Reserve is still 1, and the Online Inventory is now 9. As soon as we took the new booking, GuestPoint® updated our entire online inventory.
Imagine now, that we take 9 online bookings. How does this affect our Online Inventory?
As you would expect, the total number of Rooms Available has dropped from 10 to 1. Our Inventory Reserve is still 1, which leaves us with no rooms selling online. You will also notice a red warning symbol. This indicates there is still room(s) available at your property, however, it is your Inventory Reserve that is blocking them from being sold online. This warning only appears while you have available rooms at your property, but not available online. Depending on your occupancy, it is quite normal to hold back rooms, and you can just leave this as is. You can also adjust the Inventory Reserve. Let’s reduce it to 0.
Now you will see that the Inventory Reserve cell is light blue. This indicates that we have adjusted the reserve from the default that is setup in the Room Type setup. Online Inventory has gone back up to 1.
Finally, there will be times that we want to quickly and temporarily remove our Online Inventory. We can simply click 'Stop Sell' (small square on the right of the cell) and all inventory for the Basic Queen room for April 24 will be removed from being online regardless of how many rooms are available or what the Inventory Reserve is. You will notice that the Number of Rooms Online is now 0 and the warning re-appears as we do actually have a room available.
Getting the right mix of default online inventory reserve and when to start adjusting will take some trial and error as it varies from property to property.
To move to different dates, you can click ‘Prev 7 Days’, ‘Next 7 Days’ or select a specific date. Also, if a cell has an orange border, it means there are no rooms left for that night, so you cannot adjust the Inventory Reserve.
If you want to update multiple dates, you can use the Bulk Inventory Update screen. This lets you select a date range, specific room types and days of the week. Once you have made your selection, you can:
Set the Online Inventory Reserve: To a specific number
Set Stop Sell: On or Off
For example, you could set a Stop Sell on your Executive King, Executive Twin & Basic Queen from 24 April 2022 to 7 May 2022. Click 'Apply Changes' to update GuestPoint®.
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