LONDON—OTA Insight, a cloud-based data intelligence platform for the hospitality industry, has launched Market Insight, a predictive market intelligence solution that captures hotel booking intent in real time to uncover new revenue opportunities.
COVID-19 has had a dramatic effect on the hospitality industry, which now must plan and prepare for the rebound. Hoteliers who continue to rely too much on OTB data and do not weigh pre-booking and upper-funnel data more heavily in their forecast models may put the company’s long-term survival at risk, according to the company.
In order to more accurately forecast volatile demand, hoteliers and revenue managers must rethink their commercial strategy to navigate the new normal, where competition for lower demand in challenging conditions will be intensified. As the world moves into various phases of recovery, it will be necessary to rebuild this process from the bottom up. This approach will require a wide variety of data inputs and insights to help gauge the earliest indicators of demand by looking at pre-booking data that more accurately forecasts the return of travelers.
Developed in collaboration with industry partners, Market Insight’s AI-powered technology taps into billions of forward-looking data points from multiple top-of-funnel data sources—ranging from hotel web searches, online reviews, flight data, events, holidays and alternative lodging inventory data to deliver location-specific, segmented demand insights.
By using Market Insight, hoteliers and revenue managers can anticipate future market demand, uncover early revenue opportunities with live alerts and easily evaluate their properties’ competitiveness against their “dynamic” comp set—a comp set that reacts intelligently to changing market dynamics—all within a matter of minutes, according to the company.
“Pre-crisis, the industry was largely dependent on historical data to forecast demand. Hotels generally made critical revenue and distribution decisions based on OTB data, which provides a relatively limited data set to measure future demand,” said Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of OTA Insight. “Now, more than ever, the industry needs tools based on forward-looking data. There’s a huge volume and variety of upper-funnel data sources that when combined with advanced AI, can provide remarkably accurate demand insights even in really unpredictable market conditions. As our customers and the hospitality industry rebuilds, we believe Market Insight will become a key decision support tool.”
“With Market Insight, I can see the demand for my whole city change literally ‘live’ on the map. The system is powered by such a large number of data points but manages to convey the insights in a visual and frictionless way,” said Jussi Ojanen, hospitality business analyst at SOK.
Market Insight integrates with OTA Insight’s other intelligence solutions including its rate intelligence platform (Rate Insight) and its business intelligence technology (Revenue Insight) to enable hotels to optimize real-time performance across all commercial teams.
