How are Brand rates compared with MSE bids

The majority of travelers looking to book a hotel will start their journey of finding the right hotel by looking for the best rate from Meta sites such as Tripadvisor, Trivago, Qunar, Google, and more.

Therefore, monitoring, managing, and improving the hotel’s distribution & visibility on Meta sites is very important to reduce the cost of distribution and increase the hotel’s revenue.

FornovaDI's meta-analysis insight imitates the guest's behavior on their journey to book a hotel by comparing the brand rates to the other providers bidding on their property.

While imitating the guest behavior and making sure we are comparing apples to apples, we will be taking into account different parameters such as:

• Taking the cheapest available room with double occupancy.
• Comparing the bids from the same POS
• The guest arrival date and LOS are the same 
• Making sure both brand & other bidders rates data acquisition are acquired at the same time
• Tax policy normalization

FornovaDI carries out two types of comparisons, the first is a comparison of Brand price vs. OTA price; for this type of comparison, we take the prices from the direct Brand.com website and the prices from the direct OTA's website and compare the two.

The second is the comparison of the bids published on Meta Search Engines (Tripadvisor, Trivago, Google, etc.); for this type of comparison, we take the published bids on MSE by the brand and compare it to the published bids on MSE by the OTA. So the source of prices here are not the Brand.com or OTA, but their bids on Meta Search Engine.

The second type of shops can be found in the section "Brand public rates against all MSE rates".

FornovaDI always takes the shown price on MSE in order to show it from the point of view of the potential customer making the comparison between the different providers publishing on the different Meta Search Engines (MSE).

We will always pick the cheapest rate available for double occupancy shown on the MSE; as it was mentioned, here we do not take the rate from the direct OTA's or Brand's website.

We understand that by the end of the booking process on each one of the direct websites (Brand and OTA) you may see the same rate and be in parity, but in the section "Brand public rates against all MSE rates" we want to show you how the Brand’s bid looks compared to OTAs’ bids on the same MSE.

Therefore, we compare the OTA bid with the Brand bid, both of which are shown on the same Meta Site. The prices should be the same, if not - the hotel should contact the offending OTA and find out why they provided this MSE with a price that is different from the Brand bid. 

In cases where the OTA provided MSE with a lower price than Brand - the OTA's bid looks more competitive. As a result, you may lose potential bookings, as in most cases customers perform the booking on the channel which provides a lower price. This is a good insight that is shown on our platform.

As there are cases where the hotel is not bidding on the Meta site at the specific date we acquired the data, we will be using one of the following two methods to compare the brand rate to the cheapest bidder.

• If there is no brand bid on the Meta complying with the data acquisition parameters, Fornova will be using rates acquired directly from the brand site for comparison. With this method, we will be taking the tax information which we have received from the hotel and normalizing the prices to fit the logic of price presentation on the Meta from the specific POS from which we acquired the data.
• If there is a brand bid on the Meta complying with the data acquisition parameters, Fornova will be using the brand bid on meta as a reference rate to compare to. With his method, we will be taking the shown price as all of the prices shown on the Meta will comply with the POS price logic and compare it with no need to normalize the taxes as in cases where there is not brand bid available.

Distinguishing between the two methods is easy in Fornova DI, We have added the logo of the Meta site whenever the prices are compared to the brand bid on the Meta and indicate this in the shop details, as shown in the image below.