Customer Spotlight: Lotte New York Palace

About Lotte New York Palace

Since its opening in 1980, the Lotte New York Palace has become known as one of New York City’s most iconic hotels. Set in midtown Manhattan, this historic property is the city’s largest luxury hotel with a total of 909 rooms and suites. Its expansive meeting and event spaces are coveted for everything from business meetings and lavish weddings to family events. 

During a recent chat with Derek Brewster, Director of Revenue Management at Lotte New York Palace, we learned more about how he uses Market Insight. 

Read on to find out how Derek and his team leverage Market Insight to identify future demand, improve forecasting accuracy, and get a detailed overview of competing properties in New York’s crowded hospitality market.

A holistic market overview

Before using Market Insight, we only collected data about our compset and got market information from our OTA partners. While that was a good start, this approach left many questions unanswered and didn’t give us the well-rounded market overview we wanted. In addition, we never had good flight data for the city before implementing Market Insight. 

Once we set up the tool, we saw our market in a whole new light. Market Insight’s comprehensive, forward-looking, real-time information is extremely valuable. 

The smart compset function is also a game changer. It shows data points for a diverse range of properties and alternative accommodation providers we compete with, but whose information wasn’t easily available before. It also takes into consideration which hotels are unavailable from one week to the next. 

Seeing data from a list of relevant competitors that gets updated in real time, instead of looking at a static compset, makes it much easier to maintain our positioning and discover upcoming trends.

A clear understanding of future demand

Market Insight’s live future demand data sets this tool apart from all other market intelligence solutions. It allows me to drill down to a specific time period or even to a specific day. Then I can see the demand outlook, how hotels are pricing and what areas of the market are experiencing higher or lower levels of demand.

Market Insight is useful for keeping an eye on overall changes in the market. We’ve been using the tool to look closely at the evolution of both flight and hotel search levels. This has helped us determine buyer confidence and when the first signs of increased demand might appear. We can use this to make data-driven pricing and distribution decisions and get a head start on our competitors.

Granular demand insights and accurate forecasts

Market Insight takes the guesswork out of our research, by showing us potential travellers’ search patterns. We can see which properties and length of stay (LOS) guests are searching for, where they’re based, and what their flight search patterns are at the click of a button. This gives us a better understanding of our source markets and their travel intent than we’ve ever had before. 

Being able to compare overall market data with our hotel’s pick-up gives us more confidence when forecasting. Since we can see how demand is developing in the market 365 days rolling, we can easily update forecasts to ensure they always reflect the latest demand shifts.

Visually appealing data

Market Insight offers a visually appealing, clean and comprehensive look at what’s happening across multiple channels. The heatmap gives me a general overview of the market and when I zoom in, it reveals details like flight search volume, source markets and the LOS travellers are searching for. This helps me visualise demand in a way I haven’t seen on any other platform.

A word to your peers

I recommend Market Insight to fellow revenue management professionals. It offers access to live forward-looking demand data and other valuable market intelligence, in a way which no other tool currently does.

Whether you want to get granular and see how hotels around you are pricing, or you want to get an overview of demand hotspots in your area on any date, all the information is just a click away.