What is a rate plan audit and how do I perform one?

In walks a guest who insists that they have a negotiated account with your hotel and Last Room Available status. They demand that you honor their rate right now!

Tempers flare. The front desk agent is conflicted. They run an availability check in the PMS using the special corporate code.

Sure enough, this guest does technically have a locally negotiated, last room available account. The only problem? You haven’t seen a guest from this company in 2 years. The account is only ‘active’ because you forgot to retire this rate plan and notify the company.

Now you’re stuck; do you honor the rate, lose valuable room revenue and have to deal with a likely already annoyed guest? Or, do you turn them away, risking a major service recovery nightmare and potentially burning a bridge with any future business this account might provide?

This is unfortunately a common occurrence that has plagued many hotels at one time or another, but the solution is thankfully simple. By conducting a rate plan audit, this rate would’ve been flagged and you would’ve saved room revenue, avoided an awkward moment at the front desk, prevented a poor review score, and preserved your relationship with a negotiated account.

Let’s first get into what a rate plan audit is, and then we’ll discuss how to perform one yourself so you can make sure you avoid front-desk blowups and dissatisfied LNR accounts.

What is a rate plan audit?

A rate plan audit is a deep dive into the various rate plans at your property to see which are active or inactive, what the discount / pricing / restriction rules are for each one, and then (usually the most important part) what the production (room nights, ADR, revenue etc.) produced by each rate is, in order to gauge effectiveness of your commercial strategies and negotiated agreements.

A rate plan audit is part deliverable, but much more so a process.

Cynically, you could print a .pdf of every rate plan from your PMS, and leave it on the general manager’s desk and claim that you ‘ran a rate plan audit’, but to get the real benefits of running a rate plan audit, it’s the communication between commercial strategy teams, clients, and the valuable findings in the data that make a rate plan audit worthwhile.

A rate plan audit, no matter the format, should include at least 3 things:

The current state of affairs

First you will want to understand how every rate plan in your system is set up. Compile a list of all rate plans, their creation date, their expiration date, any rate rules (i.e. is it a % discount, or a flat rate?), LRA status, and any other relevant information that may help you assess a rate code or rate plan.

Production by rate plan

Here, a bare minimum of room nights, ADR, and room revenue is essential. Also, average length of stay (ALOS), total guests, booking lead time, and any other information like stay pattern will add color to your analysis.

Here’s an example of what a basic output might look like from a PMS or CRS.

Or, even better, here’s what production looks like within Lighthouse Performance (notice that here we can see lots of other performance metrics like how often each rate or account stays on busy nights, and where rates should be re-aligned to)

Action items and notes

This is the ‘so what’ of a rate audit. A rate audit will be useless if you do all of the analysis but then don’t follow through. At the end of a successful rate audit all departments, revenue management, sales, and operations should all have a concrete to do list that they can begin implementing right away.

These action items should be well documented and have concrete deadlines and a way to track progress. We’ll get into exactly what you should be tracking and who does what in the next section.

How to perform a rate plan audit

A rate audit can take many forms, but first you need a building block to begin. Start by getting a list of all of your rate plans and the important details we mentioned above (active dates). How you get this list is highly dependent on your tech stack. You may find that your PMS has the perfect pre-built report you need.

For other properties, this report is easier to pull from the CRS, and for some branded hotels you may find that a brand tool or system (like Hilton’s R&I or Marriott’s HPP) has what you need.

A simple rate plan audit

The most basic form of a rate plan audit involves simply flagging which rate plans are currently expired in the system.

You’d be surprised how useful this really is. Just taking stock of what’s active and what’s not will lead to valuable insights, especially when you do this exercise with the whole team. Sales will recognize old accounts that they need to touch base with, Operations will catch old rates being used as sneaky fade rates, and the revenue department will have a long list of action items: clean and update, or simply delete rates that no longer benefit the hotel.

A comprehensive rate plan audit

A simple rate plan audit is useful, but where rate plan audits start to get really powerful is when you begin to analyze all of your various rate plans and accounts with their corresponding production using business intelligence data.

By using a tool like Lighthouse Performance, you can see which companies, and corporate accounts are using what rates, and even what the stay pattern attributes are for each rate plan.

For example, you may have a corporate account: L-BSB, BusyBee Uniform Services. BusyBee is, anecdotally, a pretty good account. You see at least a few of them checking in most weeks on Monday, and their production seems strong.

You remember that you gave them a flat $119 rate with Last Room Availability, which at the time was a good deal, but it was contingent on the fact that they produced 300 room nights in 2025.

Upon doing an extensive rate plan audit, you find that BusyBee only produced 219 room nights, and yet here we are in April and they are still getting last year’s $119, LRA rate!

This is the exact reason why a rate plan audit is so important. Now that you know this account didn’t reach its promised room night goals you can now begin an outreach process, asking what else can be done to get account production increased, but also making perfectly clear that the terms of the LNR agreement need to be honored, and that a new NLRA, dynamic pricing scheme will be followed.

But locally negotiated accounts are not the only concern. Membership discounts (AAA, AARP, Military Discounts) should be consistent across all channels as any drift creates rate parity exposure. It’s also worth auditing other crucial rate plans like government per diem rates to ensure that your rates are in line with expectations and not costing you room night production from a lucrative segment.

Additionally, a rate plan audit is a powerful method for catching discrepancies. If you have a dedicated rate plan for Airline Pilots at $124 a night, for example, and you see that the ADR for the pilot rate plan is at $118, then you can dig into the data to uncover where overrides and unwanted fade rates are occurring, and take corrective action.

Creating actionable takeaways from a rate plan audit

After a rate plan audit has been performed, it’s time to put pen to paper and create action items for each respective department.

Here is a fictional but very realistic example of what might be uncovered during a rate plan audit:

Grandmoor Hotel Group just completed a full rate audit of their flagship property, and what they discovered was eye-opening!

After a comprehensive rate plan audit, they’ve discovered almost 90 inactive rate plans in their PMS, old expired corporate accounts, defunct promotions, and other various odds and ends, many are a year old or even older.

In addition, several corporate accounts were found to not match their LNR agreements, and one account was found to have been built incorrectly, and needs an update for its length-of-stay tiers.

Thankfully our fearless hotel commercial team is up for the task of getting their systems cleaned: Robert the Revenue Manager, Suzy the Sales Manager, and Jim the General Manager swing into action.

Robert hatches a plan: He’ll update the rules and rates for each rate plan in the PMS and make sure everything flows through to the CRS, maintaining system cleanliness. Suzy handles relationship management with the locally negotiated accounts that are having production shortfalls, scheduling touchpoint calls and site visits. Jim updates the Monday-morning standup meeting agenda so every front desk agent knows exactly which rate plans have been retired, and which have new rules, so everyone can avoid the walk-in-guest nightmare situation that we talked about at the beginning of the blog.

Just for good measure, the Grandmoor team does one more thing: they put a calendar placeholder to do it all again, in a year’s time, to make sure nothing slips through the cracks next time around.

Conclusion

The scenario at the beginning of this post - an impatient guest at the front desk, a manager scrambling in the PMS, a room selling for $119 on a $300 night - isn't rare. It's what happens when a rate plan audit has been postponed a quarter (or year) too many.

The good news is that the process doesn't need to be complicated. At its core, a rate plan audit asks three questions:

• What rates do we have and how are they set up?

• What are they producing?

• What action should we take?

The difficulty has never been understanding those questions, it's been finding the time and the right data to answer them thoroughly and often enough to matter. That's exactly what Lighthouse Performance is built for. Instead of pulling production reports from a PMS, manually cross-referencing account agreements in a spreadsheet, and chasing down department heads for action items, Lighthouse Performance brings account-level production, stay pattern data, busy night performance, and rate alignment gaps into a single view.

The result is a rate plan audit that takes hours instead of days, and that your whole commercial team can act on immediately, not just the person who built the spreadsheet.

If your property hasn't done a formal rate plan audit in the last twelve months, there's a good chance you have expired accounts in your system, LNR agreements being honored that no longer meet production thresholds, and discounts running across channels that are quietly eroding your rate integrity.

A structured audit, ideally supported by the right business intelligence, is the fastest way to close those gaps and go into each year (or quarter) with a rate structure that works for your hotel, not against it.

See how Lighthouse Performance makes that possible.