Hotelbeds and Rategain join forces to hunt down opaque rates in consumer channels

Bed bank hails 90% reduction in reported violations in six months

Global B2B accommodation supplier Hotelbeds and Rategain will work together to identify wholesale rates being sold by consumer-facing websites.

Majorca-based Hotelbeds will use Rategain’s Parity+ solution that uses artificial intelligence to track rate integrity.

Rategain, a leading hospitality and travel technology firm, was chosen following a competitive tender.

Together, the partners will help identify cases of opaque rates intended for offline channels being sold in other channels.

Hotelbeds said agreement forms part of its “commitment to take on responsibility for leading the fight against rate integrity abuse on behalf of the owners of the 180,000 properties that it partners with”.

Hotelbeds has also created a team dedicated to monitoring rates and invested in automated technology, which it says is unavailable elsewhere in the market, that uses data analytics to track travel sellers’ flows.

In addition Hotelbeds has introduced a strict ‘three strikes’ policy for channels that violate distribution rules, as well as tools that allow full traceability of rates and data-driven segmentation of customer channels to more closely align them with the distribution strategies of hotel partners.

This has seen Hotelbeds has block 800 sales channels of offending sellers and given up €300 million of otherwise profitable sales over the last year, resulting in a 90% reduction of reported incidences over the last six months to just 0.01% of room night production.

Carlos Muñoz, managing director at Hotelbeds, said: “This year we have made significant progress in fighting rate integrity abuse on behalf of our hotel partners and I’m pleased to confirm that incidences are now down to just 0.01%.

“But we fully recognize that this is the number one priority for many hoteliers and we are fully determined to not only reduce incidences further still, but to also become the market leader of solutions that offer hotels distribution capabilities that ensure they can sell the right rate, in the right channel, to the right guest, at the right time.

“We want to provide transparency on the state of distribution with both Hotelbeds and other players to our hotel partners.

“Therefore, recently we put out an RFP to find the best third-party provider of rate integrity technology and monitoring solutions, and it gives me great pleasure to confirm that after carefully assessing all available providers, we´ll be working with RateGain to track down rogue sellers that violate agreements by selling opaque rates originally intended for offline channels.”

Apurva Chamaria, chief revenue officer at RateGain technologies, added: “We feel this partnership is a watershed moment for our sector as Hotelbeds sets a fantastic example to the whole hospitality sector as to how bedbanks can confront rogue sellers violating rate integrity.

“Naturally then the opportunity to work together to fight this cause was unmissable as no other bedbank takes this issue as seriously.

“Hotelbeds has a winning formula, not seen elsewhere in the market, that takes accurate client segmentation through its access to the largest data pool available of client data-points and behavior, and combines it with a commitment to investment into cutting-edge distribution technology and automated processes.

“Parity+ will provide Hotelbeds with an overall parity score, giving information on availability and rate violations by both property and meta-channels – as well as helping understand violation causes, all in an easy to navigate single view dashboard.

“Additionally, the ‘On Demand Data Refresh’ feature will assist Hotelbeds to be on top of issues across 500+ distribution channels and the ‘Test Reservation Module’ called ‘Closed Loop Service’ will uncover the rogue operator behind the leaked rates.”