Lixto Software (www.lixto.com), a web intelligence company, has announced that the German hotel reservation company, hotel.de is using its Lixto Online Market Intelligence solution to help maintain price competitiveness, ensure compliance of hotels on prices and booking conditions, and to improve internal efficiency.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.”

“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.