What is Rate Match

Rate Match is a special option that allows you to keep the open rates on the hotel website in parity with the OTA's open rates. Rate Match is a special rate plan in which prices are updated automatically depending on the price at the specified rate on the selected OTAs.

How to enable and set Rate Match

To have Rate Match enabled and set up for your property, contact your Customer Support manager or Exely Customer Support team.

How Rate Match works

To set up Rate Match, a base rate plan is selected, the price of which will be compared to the price of the specified rate plan on the selected OTA.

After Exely specialists make all required settings, a special derived rate plan will be automatically created from the selected base rate.

The base rate plan will no longer be available on the booking engine — the “Official site” option will be disabled for the rate plan in the “General settings” tab > the “Points of sale” setting.

Instead, the newly created special derived rate plan will be sold. The prices will be automatically reduced in this derived rate plan, if the OTA prices are lower than on the website.

The special derived rate plan will have the following features:

1. Name of the derived rate plan will be formed according to the following template: “Best Deal: %name of the parent rate plan%”.

2. In the “General settings” tab,

• in the “Points of sale” setting, the “Official site” check-box will be ticked;

• in the “Points of sale” setting, the “Channel manager” will be unticked;

• the “Points of sale” setting will be unavailable for editing.

3. In the “Rules to derive a rate plan” tab, the “Main rule” section will be hidden, including the “Accommodation types” setting.

4. In the “Prices and restrictions” tab, there will be a hint explaining that the prices are automatically overridden in terms of the described functionality.

5. The rate plan content that cannot be inherited will be copied at the time of creating the derived rate plan.

All other rate plan settings will operate in the standard way, unless otherwise specified above.

Note: if you copy the Rate Match derived rate plan, the created copy will work as a regular rate plan, not as Rate Match.

Logic and features of Rate Match work

Prices are collected and updated in the rate plan

• automatically once a day at 5:00 a.m. hotel time zone;

• manually by clicking the “Update prices” link in the “Rate Match” > “Price history” section.
  
  

Rate Match retrieves prices from Exely Booking Engine and the specified OTA for the selected rate plan, compares these prices and determines the lowest one:

1. If the lowest price in the selected sample belongs to Exely Booking Engine, the price in the rate plan will remain unchanged.

2. If the lowest price in the selected sample belongs to the OТA — the system will compare it to the price derived from the parent rate plan of the property in Exely:

• If the OTA price is lower by more than 60%, prices will remain unchanged (the 60% threshold is set by default so as not to lower prices too much).

• If the OTA price is lower by less than 60%, these prices will be set in the derived rate plan and will be available in the booking engine.

• The result of overriding the prices should never lead to a situation in which the price of a double occupancy may be lower than the price of a single occupancy.

As a result, the prices are overridden in the derived rate plan created by Rate Match if the following criteria are met:

• the price from the rate plan in Exely is mapped with the corresponding active price from the rate plan in the OTA based on the room type/criteria from the price sample;

• the price will not be set below a safe minimum.

Let's look at the different scenarios in the table below:

Once set, the new price will be displayed in Exely Booking Engine and exported to Google Free Booking Links. Additionally, the new price will be shown in the table in the “Rate Match” > “Price history” section.

The table includes the price changes for the past 30 days. For a more detailed analysis, use the filters by room type, accommodation type, source and check-in dates (the dates for which prices were changed).

In addition, the percentage delta by which the price was reduced is displayed for each price change event.

If the property wants to change the prices (increase or decrease), it is necessary to manually change the prices in the rate plan. In this case:

• if the manually entered price is lower than the OTA price, the price will be saved.

• if the manually entered price is higher than the OTA price, the next time the prices are updated, Rate Match will detect that the OTA price is lower and automatically change the prices in the booking engine. We strive to maintain open price parity between the booking engine and OTAs, so if a hotel needs to increase prices, they need to increase them for both the booking engine and the OTA.

A promo code or discount can also be applied to the Rate Match rate plan, if required.

Note: Rate Match changes the prices only for main occupancy. For extra beds and services, the prices set by the property will be used.