How to get the most out of Lighthouse Rate Insight

The best pricing strategies rely on having access to high-quality, competitive, and accurate data. This is where a rate shopping solution can transform your approach.

It’s no surprise that rate shoppers have become an indispensable tool for hoteliers, and Lighthouse's Rate Insight is the ideal solution to help you stay on top of this dynamic market. For over a decade, it has been setting the standard for hotel market intelligence and has won the HotelTechAwards for Best Rate Shopping & Market Intelligence four years in a row.

Lighthouse Rate Insight platform overview

Rate Insight is a powerful hotel revenue management tool that provides detailed, real-time data on competitor pricing, rankings, reputation, and occupancy trends. 

The platform offers multiple user-friendly dashboards, including Calendar, Graph, and Table views, to help you easily identify pricing opportunities. You can see your competitors' current, past, and future rates with the most real-time data available. This includes data for both hotels and short-term rentals, setting it apart from other rate shopping solutions. 

The tool also provides insights into on-the-books (OTB) occupancy, giving you a clear view of high-demand days and competitor rates.

In addition to rate shopping, Rate Insight includes features for:

• Parity monitoring: Discover in real time if any online travel agencies (OTAs) or metasearch sites are undercutting your brand.com prices. This feature allows you to view parity issues up to 12 months in advance and tracks rates on both desktop and mobile devices.

• Events Calendar: Gain access to a consolidated events database to better understand what is driving demand in your market. Events are automatically imported into the dashboard and you can view them up to 365 days in advance.

• Rankings & reviews: Chart your online OTA and guest review performance against competitors. You can track changes in your ranking on major OTAs and TripAdvisor on a weekly or monthly basis, and also analyze scores and rankings for your short-term rental competitive set.

The platform is designed to be versatile and easy to use, allowing you to look at data from different angles to gain actionable insights. 

Keep a pulse on the going rate for rooms and rentals in your area

Rate Insight enables you to easily monitor and compare the pricing strategies of your competitors across all key OTAs, GDS, and brand.com. 

The platform provides live rate shops with data refreshed in real time, giving you a simple and accurate snapshot of your competitors' rates.

To get the most out of this feature, you can:

• Customize your compset: You can easily manage both a primary compset of your direct competitors and a secondary compset to capture valuable market signals and emerging trends. Unlike other solutions, Rate Insight allows for instant updates to your competitive sets.

• View past versus current rates: The platform excels at providing valuable historical context. You can incorporate historical data and trends with a single click, empowering you to make informed decisions.

• Leverage short-term rental data: Lighthouse is the first tech solution to combine hotel and short-term rental data on a single platform. This is crucial because the competitive lines between hotels and short-term rentals are converging, and hotel executives now recognize they are competing for the same guests as vacation rental owners. 

Short-term rentals are growing their share of the hospitality market and in the U.S., 64% of people who booked a rental also considered a hotel. 

By having this data, you can capture more revenue by viewing the full competitive set and identifying changes in demand sooner than your competitors.

Make the most of Rate Insight’s visualizations

Rate Insight provides various data graphs that help you visualize and understand market trends and competitive strategies. 

One such graph is the "Rate evolution" view, which allows you to monitor pace and rates to spot trends for your property and compset.

You can also use the Pace graph to track the evolution of your room bookings against lead time and assess OTB for both your hotel and short-term rental competitors. This helps you analyze the impact of your rate changes on your OTB.

A key benefit is the ability to see how occupancy is evolving compared to the same time period last year, which shows how bookers react to price fluctuations. 

These graphs give you a clear view on rate evolution, helping you identify rival pricing strategies and optimize your own strategy.

By using these graphs effectively, you can:

• Instantly get an overview of the short-term rental market around your hotel and track key performance indicators (KPIs) like scale, occupancy, and rates in comparison to your property.

• View your hotel's occupancy and market demand data by simply hovering over a given date, providing valuable context for your pricing decisions.

• Analyze pricing strategies: The platform's Strategy feature offers a high-level overview of long-term pricing and promotional strategies, empowering you to make smarter strategic decisions. 

You can uncover your competitors' discounting strategies, benchmark your own strategy, and drill down into specific elements like length-of-stay, mobile rates, and point-of-sale promotions.

Price your rooms more competitively, attract bookers and drive revenue

Rate Insight helps you make sense of pricing data by providing real-time rate intelligence and granular insights into your competitors' rates, ranking, reputation, and OTB occupancy. 

By giving you a comprehensive view of the market, it enables you to make smarter room pricing and promotional decisions. The platform allows you to align or adjust your pricing based on factors like customizable room-type mapping and parity.

By accessing this granular data, you can spot trends early and stay ahead of the competition. Identify rival pricing strategies and adjust your own rates accordingly to optimize your strategy. 

Vickie Callahan, Senior Vice President Revenue Generation at Peachtree Hotel Group stated: “Rate Insight data is the key to us maintaining our positioning and boosting our ADR - it’s an essential tool I wouldn’t want to do business without because that would be like flying blind.”

Plan pricing around events with confidence

A key feature that sets Rate Insight apart is its Events Calendar. Having this deeper context explains why you might be seeing certain trends or abnormally high rates. The events database gives you access to a consolidated list of events to better understand what drives demand in your market. You can monitor local events as well as source market holiday calendars.

This feature is invaluable for adjusting your pricing strategy. By viewing events in your rate shop calendar, you get a complete picture of demand drivers on any given date. This allows you to plan your pricing around major events with confidence, ensuring you are maximizing revenue during periods of exceptionally high demand.

Use Rate Insight as part of our commercial platform

Our commercial platform brings together the full suite of our products. With Rate Insight at the center, you can strategically align your pricing with market demand, business performance, and competitive positioning.

Market Insight

Market Insight is an industry-first predictive intelligence solution, which blends forward-looking search data from OTAs, meta sites, GDS, online reviews, into market demand levels. 

This highly accurate demand forecasting up to 365 days in advance empowers you to make more informed pricing decisions with Rate Insight to mirror market demand, boosting your occupancy and room revenue. 

Business Intelligence

Lighthouse BI is an award-winning, brand-neutral business intelligence platform that centralizes all the data you need into a single view, provides unrivalled granular insights, and leverages cutting-edge AI to deliver actionable intelligence for you and your team.

Lighthouse BI delivers actionable insights on daily performance including your rates, reservations and KPIs such as RevPAR. 

With this information at your fingertips, you can see how your room pricing and promotional strategy is performing, and decide which adjustments you need to make to fully optimize for revenue growth.

Benchmark Insight

Benchmark Insight draws on historical, current and forward-looking data sets by analyzing your hotel's performance against your competitive set to give you a better understanding of your position in the market in which you operate. 

With this analysis, you can spot competitive trends, identify areas for improvement and implement proactive strategies to capture revenue, such as refining your pricing strategy with Rate Insight to grow your market share and hit your KPIs.

Get the data you need to make smarter pricing decisions

In an industry where competition is fierce and getting your room pricing right is a cornerstone of revenue management success, Lighthouse Rate Insight provides you with the intelligence needed to stay ahead. 

It has been consistently recognized as the industry's best rate shopper for four consecutive years by HotelTechReport; a testament to its accurate and reliable data. Lighthouse is the only solution that provides real-time hotel and short-term rental data in a single platform, giving you a complete view of the market. 

With award-winning customer support and intuitive tools designed to save you time, Lighthouse transforms complexity into confidence and helps you maximize revenue growth.

To get the data you need and make smarter pricing decisions, reach out to the Lighthouse team today.