In an ever more competitive industry, hospitality establishments are hard pressed to ensure increased profits, optimised operations and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Hoteliers have a lot of challenges in their day-to-day jobs, and these teams face fluctuating variables that often create uncertainty in pricing decisions.

The industry is in desperate need of a solution that will alleviate that uncertainty with data-informed answers to vital questions such as: What price should I sell my hotel rooms at today? Should I follow my competitors’ pricing? Is there a price war going on? How do I shift bookings from OTAs to internal? What is the correlation between the change in my bookings and competitor prices?

Infor, a leading provider of industry-specific cloud applications, today announced the launch of Infor Hospitality Price Optimizer (HPO), to be generally available mid-2019. “Infor HPO is a comprehensive, built-for-the-cloud solution that delivers pricing decisions for hoteliers.

The application considers the pricing process from the guest’s point of view, including what sources a guest looks at, and compares, to make a booking,” confirms Rentia Austin, Hospitality Executive – Infor Services at iOCO, Infor’s Master Partner in Africa (operating as a Gold Partner).

The solution uses competitor rates in a smart way to determine whether a hotel is a follower or a leader in the market and, based on that assessment, uses competitor prices in its final price recommendation. As a result, Infor HPO will help hoteliers make better decisions more quickly, confidently price rooms left to sell, and increase bottom-line profits.

“The Infor team identified a gap in the marketplace for a data-driven pricing tool of this caliber, so we leveraged our extensive knowledge in revenue management and hospitality to create Infor HPO,” said Jason Floyd, General Manager, Infor Hospitality. “We sought to make pricing optimisation intuitive and accessible for hotels of all sizes, to help them increase profits in such a price-competitive industry.”

Offering a strategic price and distribution channel on which to publish this price, factoring into account distribution costs for the channels, the solution helps to boost revenues and profits. It provides simulators to predict the impact that a change of price will have on demand and expected revenues.

Through extensive research by Infor’s in-house design agency, Hook & Loop, to ensure a best-in-class user experience, the application was built with the user in mind. Its mobile-first design adapts to the marketplace’s current way of working and the imperative to access information from anywhere at any time.

Leveraging Infor’s Coleman artificial intelligence platform for infused text and voice interaction, and Infor Ming.le social business capabilities, will allow users to customise what information they want to see and when they want to see it.

“The launch of this new product, built on the backbone of Infor OS, further strengthens Infor’s global platform of cloud solutions for the hospitality industry. Infor HPO’s seamless integration with the flagship Infor HMS hospitality property management system immediately extends the value of Infor customers’ current technology investments,” concludes Austin.