Lixto Software has announced that the Germany hotel reservation company, hotel.de is using the Lixto Online Market Intelligence solution to help maintain its price competitiveness, ensure compliance of hotels on prices and booking conditions, and to improve internal efficiencies.Hotel.de offers its customers access to over 210,000 hotels worldwide with over 2.2 million unique users and accounts who book in excess of 360,000 nights accommodation per month on its website. One of hotel.de’s biggest priorities is to ensure that its competitors are not offering better deals at the same hotels and that its hotels are not reneging on their pricing agreements (best price guarantee) with hotel.de, either by offering higher prices as well as better rates to competitors.

The Lixto system works by carrying out sophisticated analysis and interrogation of pre-defined competitive websites to replicate a customer booking online based on a number of parameters to get accurate pricing and booking information on over 18,000 hotels.

 

“The Lixto solution delivers customisable standard reports that highlight the hotels with rate parity violations based on our own rule based system,” said Reinhard Wick, Head of Sales & Purchase at hotel.de. “The Lixto solution is fully automated and does not require any manual intervention.”

 

Another key advantage of the Lixto solution for hotel.de is that all the product attributes which affect the end price of the hotel product, such as breakfast or cancellation conditions, are reflected and accounted for in the information given to hotel.de, increasing the accuracy and relevance of the data available.

 

If a price rate violation with a hotel is detected, the Lixto solution generates an automated key information that notifies the relevant rate controller. Once this is verified, an email is then sent automatically to the hotelier with a detailed description of the rate violation. This enables hotels to make any price corrections as they do not want to lose their business with hotel.de.  This also allows hotel.de to ensure that its hotels are maintaining their pricing agreements (best price guarantee) on a daily basis, thus maintaining its competitiveness in the market.

 

Lixto Online Market Intelligence is also helping hotel.de by cutting internal operating costs and offering scalability to support hotel.de’s planned expansion.

 

“The Lixto solution is exceptional in that it provides hotel.de with the flexibility that we require for our geographic expansion as the number of additional competitor portals and hotels that we need to monitor increases”, said Tobias Neudek, Senior Manager Special Rates & Rate Controlling at hotel.de. “At the moment hotel.de is contracting approximately 1,000 new hotels per month. Since our Rate Controlling Team can map newly contracted hotels into the system independently of Lixto, the company saves costs and the Online Market Intelligence solution is always up-to-date. In comparison to our previous solution, Hotel.de is saving 12-15% in total operating costs per year,” he concluded.

 

Lixto Online Market Intelligence is based upon the company’s award-winning web data extraction technology that has been designed to access, augment and deliver content and data from highly dynamic web applications that utilise client-side processing techniques such as JavaScript, AJAX and dynamic HTML. This allows for fast reactions to changes in the online channels and ensures continuous service and superior data quality. On top of the data store, Lixto uses enterprise-class reporting infrastructure to provide all necessary reports and analytics to enable an efficient identification of market opportunities that are most relevant for day-to-day business. Important market events are highlighted, and reports customised to show exactly the market data that are of most interest to individual users.
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