Chopra founded RateGain in 2004, with US$100,000 when he identified the need for online travel agencies like Expedia and Orbitz to compare rates across competitor websites. The company was later valued at over $40 million in 2009. His entrepreneurial mindset has lead the way to transforming the distribution, revenue management and brand engagement landscapes, helping businesses around the world to streamline their operations and sales. What inspired you to start RateGain? The idea at a very early stage was to build a meta-search travel site like Kayak and Trivago. Now when I look back, I remember that Kayak was formed around the same time as RateGain. This was a validation for my initial concept. Conversely, I knew that it would be difficult for me to compete with giants in the B2C space since I was building a product without investment capital. I knew that since I was bootstrapping this company, a B2C business model would likely be a cash drain that I could not afford. Additionally, it could take several years before it turns out to be fruitful I sensed that switching RateGain to a B2B company would be the ideal choice for us. As a B2B company, I could license our technology to other travel players, so they could gain an understanding of what the competitive landscape is like. Today, RateGain has multiple locations with over 12,000 clients spread across the globe, and is continuing to expand worldwide. How can hotels increase their revenue optimization intelligently? We at RateGain firmly believe that
optimizing revenue should not be as laborious as it currently is. It is all about pricing right and being present on the right channels. There are multiple solutions available today that enables data to optimize revenue intelligently. In fact, we have a very successful product called RevGain that acts as a business intelligence tool and helps hoteliers keep a tab on the competitive landscape, pricing, occupancy, reviews, and other indicators. Adopting these rate intelligence tools will save revenue managers the time and effort working on huge volumes of data on spreadsheets. Rather than focusing on areas that require manual intervention, a revenue manger’s role should be of a strategist. What are the biggest mistakes hotels make when trying to optimize their pricing strategy? Today’s marketplace is very dynamic. Apart from the traditional demand and supply factor, there are multiple other factors like Mobiles, Millennials, Vacation Rentals etc that affect the hotels and their bookings. Due to the large number of factors that are affecting the market, it has become essential to price your hotel right and also there is a need to change prices frequently and dynamically as per the marketplace. Most revenue managers today use extremely complex spreadsheets to arrive at the right price. They define their own approach and plug in data into those excel sheets. Nevertheless, there are quite a few challenges with this methodology. Accuracy is one of the most critical issues. The majority of revenue managers are just using a single factor such as historical
pricing or competitor pricing for price optimization. They’re not even taking into account reviews and ratings, occupancy, market compression and upcoming events. This approach is simply not sufficient to arrive at an accurate profitable price. Another example, most hotels do not include reviews and ratings as a factor in their pricing. Furthermore, the need of the hour is the ability to respond faster in a highly dynamic environment. One simply can’t respond fast enough if the process is carried out manually. What kind of growth can the average hotel experience once the right software and approach is in place? I believe there are lots of opportunities in the hospitality industry right now. The speed of execution would be a critical determining factor between success and failure. Automation could be a hotel’s best approach. With the help of an automated solution, the hotel will now have a proactive approach in comparison to a reactive one. Moreover, the hospitality industry is facing a shortage of qualified revenue management professionals and the attrition rates are skyrocketing. A system that needs minimal human intervention is the need of the hour. The hotel would be able to offer the right combination of rooms, amenities, and services at a price that is appealing as well as honorable for its customers. Revenue managers will be able to know of every single good or bad review about their property, and thus would be able to work on their shortcomings on the basis of their customer’s genuine feedback. Summing up concisely, technology will allow hotels to follow ILHA 17