The Spanish-based international hotel chain, Room Mate Hotels offers a different concept; the chain positions itself as a design and innovation hotel group characterised by customising all guest services. The strategy is to implement a “reverse revenue” model - from bottom (best deals) to the top (high rates).

Room Mate Grace has taken the bold step to never drop rates, this has been approached by utilising distribution technologies (RTSuite by RateTiger) to speed up the process of updating rates. 

The group has had to marry different revenue strategies for business-leisure by adopting the synergies to apply relevant ancillary revenues. It has meant a change in culture within the business from an offline sales mode to a primarily online sales mode. 

The hotel has also had to become much more aware of local competition and take an approach that goes against the trend of the market. The implementation of a room and rate distribution technology has been key to achieving these aims, without which the team would have struggled to meet core objectives and rate expectations. The application of multiple additional tailored services to the guest has also had to be incorporated within daily operations, therefore requiring the application of intuitive revenue technologies.

According to Kathi Grützmacher, Director of Sales Distribution & e-Marketing, “In the past years, when we started to do revenue management, we didn’t really have a strategy… it was a last minute strategy. Now we have a one to two year strategy, and change rates much less often. Depending on the bookings in each hotel, we fine-tune the revenues a long way upstream. We start low and we go high… it depends on the potential we have on the books. But once the price goes up, it can’t come back down.”

The choice to use RateTiger was made by Kathi. She experienced the product during her times with other top chains like Sol Meliá, Hesperia and NH Hoteles.