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While still working in hotels, our sales team constantly looked for information on our competitors’ group and conference price offers. Later in my professional career, I realized that conference centers, event agencies and DMC companies had needs very similar to ours.
Back in the day, the only way to gather information was to ask friends working in various companies for personally sending an inquiry to the indicated facility or a rival company and collect offers for us. The situation was so uncomfortable that we were actually not able to do it very often. People who did us such a favor had their own jobs and did not have spare time to correspond with hotels (or other companies to which the inquiry was sent) about the projects that were not even supposed to take place.
Therefore, when planning on my own business, I very well understood a need for creating a solution that would help hotels, conference centers, travel agencies, event agencies and other companies to better and easier understand what pricing strategy can they expect from their competition.
That’s how Competition Shopping was built from scratch.
As we learned very quickly, the demand for Competition Shopping service exceeded our expectations. We have therefore created hundreds of new websites, launched additional phone numbers and hired auditors who are now able to conduct research in a variety of languages. The data which was initially sent in the form of a spreadsheet is now automated in a modern online system thus providing information in an even faster and more accessible way.
Competition Shopping was initially created to allow a better understanding of competition’s group and conference pricelists. It now turns out that it enables exploring much broader spectrum of queries such as the wedding inquiries, proms, volume contracts for accommodation and much more. The potential for use of Competition Shopping tool is endless.
We are capable of investigating any kind of inquiry related and important to your business.
For one of the exhibition centers, for example, we’ve examined data on how other similar companies respond to the inquiries related to organization of trade fairs and competition’s pricing of individual components of the offer. The equipment rental company, on the other hand sought for information on their sector competitor’s pricelists and they got exactly what they needed from the Competition Shopping tool.
Need to better understand your competitor’s pricing strategy? Try Competition Shopping today!
Regular monitoring and systematic data collection give a different level of data understading and price offer changes in one’s competition environment.
How so?
To better understand a mechanism of action, let us analyze the outcome of a regular monitoring based on a following scenario:
Sending four different inquiries to competitors every month, shows trends on how competition sets prices in case of every group category.
When a single offer turns out to be significantly higher than the others, it may also indicate an increased demand on a given date.
This way, Competition Shopping tool may also assist with setting correct, market adjusted prices for your own group and conference queries in the upcoming months. Remember, an inaccurate pricing is one of the most common reasons for canceling potential inquiries. Use Competition Shopping regularly to convert more of your business opportunities.
