Hotel Santo Domingo Boosts RevPAR 22% with IDeaS’ Automated, Machine-Learning Solutions

The Story

Situated in the heart of Madrid, the four-star Hotel Santo Domingo is ideally located for the many tourists that visit the Spanish capital each year. With a range of attractions including the Royal Palace and the Plaza de España less than 500 metres from its doors—the Prado Museum and the Bernabeu Stadium only minutes away by Metro—Hotel Santo Domingo is popular among travellers wishing to enjoy and explore the city

With tourist and leisure guests making up 95 percent of its business, the hotel has benefited from the Ideal Pricing power provided by IDeaS G3 Revenue Management System (RMS) over the last year to boost revenue efficiency and optimise profitability at the room-type level.

The implementation of IDeaS G3 RMS has freed the hotel’s revenue management team from manual tasks like entering and reviewing countless amounts of data. They now have more time to focus on strategic revenue planning instead of tactical activities like distributing daily rates.

“I think revenue strategy is a key aspect to a hotel’s culture. Since our IDeaS G3 RMS implementation, there’s been a noticeable shift in focus as we’ve become much more oriented to revenue strategy,” said Yolanda Alonso, revenue manager at Hotel Santo Domingo. “Now that all the information we need—including critical forward-looking market data—is visually displayed, constantly updated and folded into the analytics in one easy to use application, we can confidently price and yield our business based on science, not guesswork.”

“As part of this process, I use the ‘What-if’ functionality to instantly evaluate the impact of a planned change in strategy. This allows me to quickly see the impact of such changes on the demand, ADR, occupancy and RevPAR, so we can either implement the changes with confidence or decide to stay on course as the changes might have a negative or minimal impact.”

Using an automated RMS has transformed what revenue managers like Yolanda Alonso can achieve when it comes to the analysis and review of business for the upcoming months. What once took an entire day for her to analyse just a single month, now only takes Yolanda a fraction of the time to analyse several months into the future.

“This time last year I simply didn’t have tools to accurately anticipate what was happening in the market,” Yolanda Alonso said. “It was frustrating knowing we were missing opportunities as I could only react and change things at the last minute. I no longer spend hours manually evaluating the impact of a change; I can achieve things that previously were out of reach. Simply put, I can achieve a lot more in a lot less time thanks to IDeaS.” While delighted with the performance of IDeaS G3 RMS, the hotel’s senior management team realises the importance for users to configure the technology to fit their own unique business requirements.

“The reality is every hotel is different, so what works at one venue won’t necessarily have the same impact elsewhere,” said general manager Antonio Núñez Pardo. “To get the most out of IDeaS G3 RMS we’ve configured the system to suit the needs of our hotel, helped of course by the IDeaS support team.”

“Over the last year, IDeaS has been there for us at every stage of our revenue management journey—from the initial implementation of the system to our ongoing monthly calls.”

The Hotel Santo Domingo team is convinced of the importance technology will continue to have in the industry.

“Ultimately, it’s about leveraging technology to make informed decisions for the future,” said Pardo. “Hoteliers are faced with a choice of whether they want to work in the past or in the future. I like to compare it to deciding to use candles when electricity is available.”

“We are now doing things that were previously impossible, like accurately forecasting at a micro level and creating pricing strategies for an entire year that continually optimise each day. Our performance over the last 12 months speaks for itself.”

Since we began using IDeaS G3 RMS last August, every single one of our performance metrics have improved. Our ADR is up 20%, RevPAR is 22% higher and occupancy has risen to 93%. We could not be more pleased with these positive results.