It turns out finding hotels interested in revenue management systems, specifically dynamic pricing, is tricky. Not only from a business perspective, but also from a technical perspective too.

From a business perspective, most independent hotels in general are quite rudimentary in terms of technology and sometimes do not even use a property management system (PMS). Some still use Microsoft Excel to manage their property or a bunch of different tools to manage check-in, payments, channel manager, communication with guests, etc. Few have heard of revenue management besides simple techniques such as increasing prices according to the occupancy rate of the hotel. Finding the right hotels to work with is difficult and requires contacts in the industry. Targeted ads is also not viable as there’s barely any searches for revenue management systems in Brazil.

The other challenging aspect is the technical one. For a proper revenue management system to work, it needs to integrate with your PMS or Channel Manager. There are many, many PMS and Channel Managers out there that hotels use. One could identify the most popular ones, however each integration is a significant amount of work.

Unlike I originally thought, I’ve now found out that there’s actually 4 different solutions for intelligent hotel night pricing in Brazil: Inteligência em Ocupação, Bebook, HPrice and VoaPricing.

Overall this is just a difficult, too specific area inside the hospitality industry for a complete outsider like me.

Pivoting towards a property management system

I have a new idea on what QuartoVerde could be instead: a property management system. While this is a more crowded space, both business and technical perspectives are simpler. There’s a constant stream of new clients looking for a system to manager their hotel. There are tools such as Telescope that let you understand how often a search query is issued as how much it would cost to rank in the top ad spaces. While there was barely any traffic for dynamic pricing solutions, keywords like “sistema de gestao hoteleiro” (en: hotel management system) have real traffic. Ranking well on such queries or buying ads could be a simple way to acquire potential early customers.

Many of the already existing solutions are fully featured and include sophisticated check-in and check-out systems, payment systems, channel managers, electronic receipts, reservation engine, WhatsApp integration and others.

While I was researching the queries that users issue, I noticed the most popular refinement is “sistema de gestao hoteleiro gratis” (en: free hotel management system). There’s very few solutions in this space, which makes sense, as those services are complex and don’t make business sense being free to use. My idea is to offer a free version of a PMS, only containing the very core features required for managing a hotel: managing hotel reservations and check-in/check-out. Everything else would be paid add-ons: payments, reservation engine, channel manager, rate shopper, electronic receipts, website hosting, etc. Offering a free solution should be a great way to get initial properties to talk to and understand their pains. They have nothing to lose and are likely willing to pay for a system that works well for them and saves them time. There’s still many ways this could go wrong: perhaps these potential customers are really not willing to pay for any system; I may be severely underestimating the amount of work involved in a PMS; no client is interested in such a basic version.

I think this could be a much gentler entry into the hospitality industry. It could be a great way to get a foot in this industry and open doors to eventually expanding new areas such as the original idea, dynamic pricing. I’m excited to try making a quick prototype to test this idea!