Customer stories

Customer spotlight: Hilton RMCC Shanghai

How Hilton RMCC Shanghai uses Lighthouse to make faster, more confident rate decisions

Key Results:

  • ADR around 200 Yuan above competitors during the China Food and Drink Fair in Chengdu

  • RevPAR performance improved from second to first among competitors

  • Saves at least one hour every day across three properties

  • Identifies Best Rate Guarantee issues across channels, reducing BRG fee exposure


About Hilton RMCC Shanghai

Hilton’s Revenue Management Cluster Center (RMCC) in Shanghai oversees multiple properties across Greater China, operating in a fast-moving market where short booking windows and shifting demand require constant attention to pricing and competitor behavior.

Selina Liu, Cluster Revenue Manager at Hilton RMCC Shanghai, is responsible for revenue strategy across three hotels. Her role includes competitive rate monitoring, market analysis, and frequent pricing adjustments throughout the day to keep each property aligned with market conditions.

Moving beyond manual rate shopping

Challenge 

Before using Lighthouse, Selina relied on manually checking OTAs like Ctrip to track competitor pricing. This meant searching each hotel individually and reviewing calendar pricing one by one, often several times a day.

The data itself was limited. She could only see the lowest displayed rate on a single channel, with no visibility into room categories or how inventory was being sold. In some cases, brand.com rates were not visible, and in others, only higher room categories were displayed, making it difficult to understand true pricing positions.

In a market with shorter booking windows, this created real risk. Demand could shift quickly, and by the time rates were checked, opportunities had already passed.

Solution 

Lighthouse Pricing provides real-time access to competitor pricing across multiple channels, with visibility into room categories, rate structures, and availability.

Result

  • Eliminated manual rate checks across multiple platforms

  • Gained full visibility into competitor pricing beyond the lowest rate

  • Improved understanding of how competitors price across channels and categories

“Before Lighthouse, I had to open my phone and manually search each hotel to check their calendar pricing. I could only check one thing – their lowest rate. But with Lighthouse, I can check a hotel’s lowest pricing, their best available rate, and I can also see how their room categories are selling”

Selina Liu, Cluster Revenue Manager, Hilton RMCC Shanghai

From delayed data to real-time competitive intelligence

Challenge 

Previous tools provided delayed data and limited visibility, often restricted to brand.com rates without insight into other channels or room categories.

Solution 

Lighthouse Pricing delivers real-time, multi-channel pricing data with detailed visibility into competitor strategies.

Result

  • Immediate visibility into competitor rate changes

  • Ability to compare pricing across multiple channels

  • Clearer understanding of whether competitors are repricing or selling out

“Compared with our previous tool, Lighthouse gives you pricing on time – it refreshes in real time, rather than being delayed. It also covers multiple channels, not just brand.com. And it shows room category pricing, which our previous tool couldn’t do.”

Selina Liu, Cluster Revenue Manager, Hilton RMCC Shanghai

Saving time across three hotels

Challenge 

Managing three hotels required repeated manual checks throughout the day, reducing time available for strategy

Solution 

With Lighthouse, Selina can instantly switch between properties and access all relevant data in one place

Result

  • Saved at least one hour per day across three hotels

  • Reduced manual workload

  • Enabled more time for pricing decisions

“Maybe one hotel takes 30 minutes a day, and I check several times. For three hotels, it takes a lot of time. Now I save at least one hour every day.”

Selina Liu, Cluster Revenue Manager, Hilton RMCC Shanghai

Capturing ADR opportunities in real time

Challenge 

In Greater China, booking lead times are relatively short, giving Selina a limited window to recognize a change in demand and adjust rates. Manual rate shopping made that harder because it provided a snapshot of competitor pricing rather than a clear view of how rates were developing across future dates. On high-demand nights, reacting too late could mean selling rooms below the rate the market would support.

Solution 

With Lighthouse Pricing, Selina can look beyond today's rates and monitor competitor pricing over the coming week, the next 90 days and further ahead. She uses changes in competitor rates as an indication of how demand may be developing. When competitors increase their prices, for example, it can signal stronger demand and an opportunity to review her own pricing. She can then adjust the hotel's transient BAR while that opportunity is still available.

Result

  • This visibility protects an estimated 50–100 Yuan in ADR opportunities on peak nights

  • Improved responsiveness to demand changes

  • Strengthened competitive positioning

“If we did not use Lighthouse to identify future opportunities, we would lose the ADR opportunity, 50 to 100 Yuan by some high-demand peak nights.”

Selina Liu, Cluster Revenue Manager, Hilton RMCC Shanghai

Using event signals to price ahead of peak demand

Challenge 

Large exhibitions can create sharp changes in demand, but Selina needs to identify those shifts early enough to adjust pricing before the market moves. Relying on manual checks makes it harder to understand both the event itself and how competitors are responding as the date approaches.

Solution 

Events are one of the Lighthouse features Selina checks most often. When she identifies an upcoming event, she calculates the expected demand impact and checks competitor pricing to see whether there is room to push rates further.

That workflow proved especially valuable during the China Food and Drink Fair in Chengdu, where Selina used Lighthouse to monitor market information and competitor pricing throughout the exhibition period.

Result

  • RevPAR performance moved from second to first among competitors during the exhibition

  • ADR was around 200 Yuan above competitors during the same period

  • Competitor pricing gave Selina an additional signal for how aggressively to position rates

“During the China Food and Drink Fair exhibition, our ADR has been around 200 Yuan above our competitors. That’s a huge incremental advantage.”

Selina Liu, Cluster Revenue Manager, Hilton RMCC Shanghai

Identifying rate compliance issues across channels

Challenge 

Best Rate Guarantee (BRG) violations – where rates on third-party channels undercut the direct rate – were difficult to spot without checking each channel manually. Each violation carried a fee cost for the hotel.

Solution 

Lighthouse Pricing shows rates across multiple channels for each property. Selina can identify whether pricing is correct on each channel and spot cases where rates have been loaded incorrectly or where channels are displaying rates that undercut the direct price.

Results

  • Reduced BRG issues by identifying rate discrepancies across channels

  • Hotels save on BRG fees that were previously triggered by undetected parity violations

“We can identify each channel for the hotels’ pricing to check if it’s correct or not. So that will help the hotel save the BRG rate.”

Selina Liu, Cluster Revenue Manager, Hilton RMCC Shanghai

Sharing market intelligence across the cluster

Challenge 

Selina manages pricing centrally, but each of her three hotels has its own on-property team. Keeping everyone aligned on market conditions and competitive positioning required a way to share intelligence without requiring every team member to do their own analysis.

Solution 

The hotel teams use Lighthouse’s daily push report in their morning meetings. Selina is the primary user who logs into the platform and refreshes data throughout the day. In business review meetings, she screen-shares live Lighthouse data to walk the teams through current pricing and market conditions.

Results

  • Hotel teams consume market intelligence through the daily push report without needing to log in themselves

  • Business review meetings are grounded in live competitive data

  • Selina can switch between all three hotels in about one second, making cluster-wide monitoring practical

Final thoughts

For Selina, Lighthouse supports both efficiency and better decision-making across her portfolio.

“It's not only helping us save time, but it also helps us implement the right strategy to make the hotels maximum revenue."

Time-consuming manual rate shopping made it harder to keep pace with changing demand across three hotels.

Lighthouse Pricing combines real-time competitor rates and market intelligence, helping Selina identify opportunities earlier and act on them faster.

Discover how Lighthouse Pricing gives you the market visibility to price with confidence