The Fern Hotels & Resorts is one of India’s leading environmentally sensitive hotel chain. It has 58 hotels and 2800 rooms currently operational under management across 42 locations in India & abroad. They operate under the brands – The Fern, The Fern Residency, Beacon Hotels and have a selection of independently branded hotels.
The chain was functioning with revenue manager at every hotel who was manually entering the rates and availability on a
channel manager, at most twice a day. In many hotels, this resource was shared between operations (Front Office) and revenue management.This diluted the required focus on revenue maximization as they were unable to follow the changing market trends. Especially on high demand dates, they were struggling to optimize their ARRs as they could not change the room rates fast enough. They were looking for an automated solution which would remove their reliance on manual processes and give them an edge over their competition.
The group introduced
Aiosell in two of its city properties – Fern Ecotel, Ahmedabad and Fern Goregaon, Mumbai. They were immediately able to see the value of an automateddynamicpricing system. The room rates changed with every room sold taking into accountvarious factors including even the time of the booking.They were able to map their competition hotels’ rates in Aiosell and accordingly,remain competitive in the market.
It took many months for the parties to get the dynamic pricing model right, but when they did, it was unreal. The hotels saw unprecedented occupancy levels and ARR increase of 10% during the last few months of 2019.
The AI based algorithms enabled the hotel to maximize yields on peak dates and increased their occupancy on low demand dates. This automation also helped the operations team focus their attention on guests while the centralized management team could dedicate their efforts on strategic tasks like new product development and marketing activities. Moreover the centralized revenue management team now had a uniform and pricing strategy which they could implement across the group.
The group is using STAAH channel manager and Aiosell is using its existing integration with STAAH, to push room availability and dynamic rates to OTAs through Staah. In Fern Goregaon, the property also had WinHMS as a PMS, which is also 2 way integrated with Aiosell so all bookings from channel manager could be auto-delivered to the PMS – reducing manual reservation tasks.
