Austria Trend Gains a Competitive Advantage Leveraging Automated Revenue Management

The Story

Austria Trend Hotels & Resorts, part of The Verkehrsbüro Group, have a wide range of modern city hotels, beautiful holiday resorts and versatile event hotels. With 32 properties in Austria and two hotels in Ljubljana and Bratislava, Austria Trend is Austria’s largest hotel group. Their business is targeted in the four-star category and the core market of Vienna.

Without IDeaS RMS and NHSSP, it would take more work, and thus more resources, to achieve even a fraction of the system’s results.

A head start on the competition

With 19 properties in the competitive Vienna market, Austria Trend is aware that each hotel has its own unique ‘mini-market’ and set of associated challenges. According to Norbert Treitler, director of business development at Austria Trend, there are more challenges than ever when opening a new hotel. “With the steadily increasing number of competitor hotels in the market and the difficult economic situation, we need to be able to anticipate changes in demand earlier and be able to respond with speed,” said Treitler

IDeaS Revenue Management System (RMS) has an important function in the existing Austria Trend Hotels. Treitler explained, “IDeaS RMS has proved to be an essential tool helping us to price strategically and optimise our different business segments. The efficiency and usability of the system provides us with a state-of-the-art environment to drive better revenue.”

“The results of using IDeaS RMS in our other properties had convinced us that we needed a solution that would enable us to run IDeaS RMS in our new properties as soon as possible,” explained Treitler. “We decided to utilise the IDeaS New Hotels Service Success Package (NHSSP) for our two latest Viennese hotel openings so we could gain the business intelligence for our new properties as quickly and as accurately as possible in order to stay ahead of the competition.”

Optimising performance from before day one

Whilst it would usually take up to 12 months of hotel operation to produce the historical data needed to make strategic business decisions, by implementing the NHSSP, Austria Trend was able to utilise an innovative solution to this challenge. The NHSSP enables new hotels to have pricing and revenue management tactics entirely automated before a hotel even opens by creating historical data profiles for the new properties. To create these profiles, Austria Trend analysed its new properties and compared them to similar existing properties within the group, looking for similarities in their market mix. Booking pace data was then taken from the selected sister hotels and combined to create profiles for the new hotels. The patterns of these profiles will be replaced as the new hotels open and actual patterns begin to emerge.

Treitler stated that the application of the NHSSP ensures that “the analysis and setup work for IDeaS RMS is done in the preopening phase, meaning that by the time of opening, we have the data and tools needed to accurately forecast our business. To be competitive—that is crucial.”

“Without IDeaS RMS and NHSSP, it would take more work, and thus more resources, to achieve even a fraction of the system’s results. With IDeaS, once these hotels open they will have more time to fully focus on the guests and provide the best customer service, which at the end of the day, is what a successful hotel is about,” Treitler added.

With the group booking requests for citywide conferences arriving two years in advance, it is vital for Austria Trend to have a revenue management system in place that can evaluate groups. “The IDeaS RMS Group Pricing module, using the NHSSP data, considers costs and profits associated with the group request, allowing us to see what effect accepting a group will have on the forecasted business of our hotels. Our properties can achieve the best business mix from the moment we open our doors,” Treitler said.

A growing partnership

Throughout the partnership with Austria Trend, IDeaS has functioned above and beyond expectations. “We receive a very high service level from IDeaS. There is a monthly call for our hotels, to make sure everything is running smoothly, and to discuss any new enhancements that have recently been made available to IDeaS RMS”, said Treitler

IDeaS RMS and NHSSP shorten the period of time it takes for a hotel to reach full potential after opening, thereby providing a faster return on investment for owners and investors.

Our properties can achieve the best business mix from the moment we open our doors.