Connectivity software supercharges growth for hotel group

Diego Alejandro Torres Sanchez is the director of revenue management at GHL Hotels, a hotel group with more than 60 hotels and 7,000 rooms across 10 countries in Latin America. GHL Hotels is headquartered in Bogotá, Colombia, and offers a variety of hotels, including luxury, business and resort properties. GHL is also the largest third-party hotel operator in the Andean region and Central America.

Leading the revenue management team of one of the most reputed and established hotel chains in Colombia requires Diego to implement strategies that can quickly adapt to volatile market conditions. When he noticed that revenue available per room (RevPAR) was dropping, he quickly investigated potential underlying causes. His findings revealed the following issues were slowing down the hotel group’s ability to scale:

• Manual updates: updating rates and inventory on the Expedia extranet was a struggle without the aid of technology.
• Inventory control: GHL Hotels faced frequent overbooking issues due to the lack of automatic inventory control.
• Limited visibility: the absence of demand forecast data and competitive intelligence hindered the team’s ability to plan operations, budget and track market insights effectively.
• Localisation hurdles: operations and support friction were exacerbated due to limited language localisation capabilities.

Diego knew what he had to do to reverse the stagnation and achieve growth—partner with the right technology partner. 

Diego set out to find a technology partnership that could bring together channel management, business intelligence and demand data insights in one place—in real time. He also knew he required both reach and speed to ensure that GHL could offer the best pricing to a maximum number of travellers. And finally, it was important to him that they had a Spanish-speaking support team and knowledge of the Latin American hospitality landscape to overcome the localisation hurdles the team currently experienced.

When researching, Diego leveraged our Connectivity Partner Programme. The programme identifies top integrated software solutions as Elite and Preferred. These partners have been vetted as ideal for streamlining operations and driving growth with Expedia Group.

After reviewing his options, Diego ultimately identified RateGain as the ideal connectivity partner for his business. RateGain is recognised by Expedia Group as an Elite connectivity partner due to their exceptional connection quality and comprehensive functionality on our platform.

RateGain’s seamless connection with Expedia Group empowered GHL to achieve a 32% increase in reservation volume on the Expedia Group platform and process over 40 million ARI—a staggering 90% growth from the previous year!*

The seamless partnership between the hotel group, the connectivity provider and our tech platform made Diego’s job of achieving his revenue targets possible. The RateGain channel manager equips his team with real-time ARI and reservation delivery data. Meanwhile, Optima, RateGain’s competitive intelligence tool, is responsible for constructing accurate forecasts, providing parity insights and generating daily competitive pricing reports.

As an added bonus, RateGain’s local language-speaking support and account management team has made it easy for the GHL team to work faster and solve queries efficiently.

Today, Diego can’t imagine what distribution at GHL Hotels would look like without RateGain’s software in combination with Expedia Group’s tech platform.