Customer spotlight: Santikos Collection

We sat down with Mr Konstantinos Santikos, Managing Director of Sales & Finance, for Santikos Collection in Athens, Greece to learn more about how and why he uses Lighthouse’s Rate Insight tool. This interview covers everything from the challenges faced before switching to Rate Insight, to the detailed overview of the market and the more informed pricing decisions Mr Santikos can now make using our tool.

About Santikos Collection

Santikos Collection consists of five luxury hotels and resorts placed across the dreamy settings of the Skiathos and Alonissos islands, the stunning city of Athens, and the picturesque mountain of Pelion. Each property embraces the local area, blending it with a relaxed style of luxury and providing a selection of goods from local producers.

Market segmentation

Our main business is resorts on the Greek Islands and we operate from 150-170 days a year, depending on the destination. The Santikos brand is well established, with no direct competition, but still a need for relevant pricing compared to the market. Lighthouse caught my interest with their competitive rate shopper solution, which enables quick and accurate rate changes in a process that would normally take us a whole day. We started using Rate Insight for our in one of our resorts to test if it could work for us - and it does.

Our challenges

Before using Rate Insight our challenges were around price accuracy and being undercut. If we wanted to study market demand we had to manually collect data from multiple sources, and we weren’t sure if the reason a rate was lower was due to an OTA, or events in the local area. This meant we had to guess which would be the best dates to prove our thesis of having the best available rate. Rates could also move between 10 and 15% within a day, which then changes the whole pricing model. This made it difficult to be fully accurate with our pricing overall. 

Now with Rate Insight, I receive automated reports every morning, which provides an overview of the neighboring hotels pricing changes and helps us adjust our strategy quickly and easily.  Until last year, our pricing strategy was based solely on demand and sales, but now we are able to incorporate market trends that help us secure extra demand, which in turn means additional revenue. 

Time-saving technology

Rate Insight has been a game-changer because the tool helped me to not only enhance my pricing strategy but also fully understand how the market works. What’s completely changed is how fast I can make decisions. I would spend a minimum of an hour on analysis most days, but now I have reports daily so I make decisions in five seconds. We’ve saved at least eight hours a week. 

One of my goals was to experiment and test if Santikos Collection could expand in other hotel star categories or brands in our region. Rate Insight allowed me to see if it was worth it and make a business plan even easier than before. Rate Insight is great for companies who are looking to invest in hotels because it’s easy to have a market overview based on accurate and live data.

Questions answered

I can now understand our hotel’s performance from another perspective; our strategy versus competitors pricing and market demand. Before, we had questions around our pricing strategy and accuracy such as: is the price I’m selling a room at worth it? Will guests understand the value they’re getting if the rate is more than 20%-30% more expensive than the hotel next door, or do I need to adjust? 

Sometimes it was the other way around: Am I selling too low to get sales? Will demand be affected by this? Am I damaging my brand? With Rate Insight, these questions are no longer an issue. As well as securing additional demand, Rate intelligence helps me position all the hotels in the market. I regret not using Rate Insight earlier, two years ago. Using the tool is worth it because you satisfy one of the basic human needs which is curiosity. If you have an automatic connection between Rate Insight and the channel manager and place yourself 10% above the average price, you will hit your sales goal every year. With Rate Insight, you create your own revenue. As a tool, Rate Insight is perfect and the cost of the subscription is nothing compared to what you get back in return.