There is no efficient rate shop without a proper configuration of rental duration and a smart choice of day-of-week. To select them, you must analyze precisely your volume of business by departure day and rental duration both split by season (low, medium, and high season) and by period (business or leisure). Do not forget to split the seasons with a gradient. In practice, in a low season, some periods may be with a high utilization (ie : Christmas vacations departure during Winter) and some others may face a low utilization in a high season (ie : the 15-day of gap following the end of New-Year eve and before the mid-January boost in Caribbean islands).

Regarding the duration, a rental station strongly impacted by mid-week business-type of rental must be configured with a rate shop on 2 or 3-day duration departing on Tuesday or Wednesday around 8 or 9 am. If the mix of clients is concentrated on the weekend like for leisure-type of station, you must configure the competitive rate shop for a 3-day rental departing on Friday around 3 or 4 pm (to be sure to retrieve weekend rates) or for a 2-day rental departing on Saturday morning.

On the other hand, if you are operating a pure leisure destination (like Morocco, Spain, Caribbean islands, Croatia, etc), a 7-day rental must be configured. However, this may not be enough. The analytics, available on the web application CocktailRM provided by WeYield, lights up the key rental duration to be set. It may be useful also to analyze the so-called « exotic duration »: the ones that are not booked that much but could generate good value anyway. For example, the duration that requires adding a package with some extra days to build a 10-day rental (7 packages + 3 extra days) or a 19-day rental (14 packages + 5 extra days). This process will enable you to check your pricing positioning on all the market components and will avoid your brand not being booked on this high-value duration.

Keep an open eye open on what your competitors are doing.

Make sure you know precisely the pricing tactic of your major competitors. Some of them broadcast different 3-day prices for a Thursday departure depending on the time of the day: at 9 am, it may be a « regular » business rental while you will need to shop for a departure at 3 pm to retrieve the « week-end » rental price. To get alerted on these behaviors, there is no other solution than to play and check regularly on the web with their rate engine. Do it from home to avoid an IP blockage if you are identified with too many queries over a small period.

In Rateshaker, the new parameter (number of rental duration) is added up on top of the number of suppliers/sites (Rule #1) and the number of stations (Rule #2) to be shopped. Thus, over the previous 150 shops configured, if you want to retrieve the prices for 3 rental duration (a 3-day out of Friday pm for a week-end rate, a 7-day rental out of a Saturday and a business type rental of a 2-day out of Tuesday am), the new number of queries will be 150 x 3 = 450.

——–

Next week, Discover our rule #4: "Select a good day to run the query".