The Pricing Intelligence Engine (PIE) effortlessly gathers and displays market data in real-time serving as a Revenue Management System (RMS). With competitive intelligence and an all-in-one dashboard, our new tool streamlines complicated pricing decisions and helps yield your property more revenue.
This article shows a general overview of the Price Intelligence Engine (PIE) on Cloudbeds PMS.
Cloudbeds believes every lodging business is unique. We have tools for every size and budget to establish and grow. Reach out to our Support Team for more information on each available package.
If you are not yet a Cloudbeds customer, click here to access our Pricing Guide and schedule a Demo.
Benefits
PIE allows you to:
- See key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time
- Compare KPIs to the previous day, month, or year
- Watch and respond to the rules and alerts you create
- Set up automated rules and have the system make all the changes for you
- View your property's top reservation sources
- Actively track how your rates compare to your competitors
Features Overview
Starting from the PIE section of your Main Menu, click on the Overview to quickly take a look at your property’s PIE performance, and identify what needs attention without having to dig through raw data.
For more details, visit the PIE - Overview page.
Use multiple competitive sets to track, benchmark, and respond to market data.
Our Pricing Intelligence Engine can track your competitors’ availability and rates (overall or by selected accommodations) from OTAs like Expedia, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Hostelworld, Priceline, and Orbitz.
- For more details, visit PIE - How to create/add a compset.
- Learn more about our Recommended OTAs and Distribution Channels
Rules and alerts allow your property to take control of your pricing and distribution strategies. Each rule or alert is set up to respond to real-time market changes including occupancy, restrictions (i.e. length of stay), and competitors’ rates.
For more details, visit: PIE - Rules and Alerts overview.
The Rate Manager allows you to easily see your current occupancy, update rates, set price differentials derived from base room type and manage the rules or alerts triggered.
Get a complete view of all the important information you need while making rate decisions. Or just set automated rules and the rates will be updated by the system without any manual involvement.
For more details, visit: PIE - Rate Manager overview.
The Rate Shopper allows you to compare your property’s rates to those in your various compsets.
It shows the property's rates and occupancy as well as market data (compset rates and how competitors’ rates have increased or decreased since yesterday) in a detailed view, which can be sorted by competitors' lowest/highest price or by selected accommodations, also showing competitors’ average.
For more details, visit: PIE - Rate Shopper overview.
Keep track of local events, like a large conference or concert, that may affect your pricing and distribution strategies.
Events are displayed within various calendars and dashboards to give context to market data.
For more details, visit: PIE - Events overview.
Keep track of all the changes done in PIE by user or the system in PIE Activity Logs. With this tool you can easily investigate the rules behavior and check the date/time or details of selected changes done in the system.
Learn more about the Activity Logs page.
How to set up
One of the primary functionalities of PIE is creating and maintaining compsets - a list of similar properties, with which your property competes for business, typically within the same geographical location and similar star rating.
After you select which properties should appear in your compset, we obtain data from the indicated OTAs such as Expedia, Booking.com or Hostelworld, and provide the rates (overall or for the selected accommodation types). We then take these to determine the high and low prices for each competitor. Learn more in our Knowledge Base: PIE - How to create/add a compset.
Once the compsets have been built, the data will instantly appear on the Rate Shopper page.
Compset-based alert triggers a notification each time the base rate in your property is higher/lower than your competitor(s)
Note that the alert does not yet work as a rule and currently can not be set to change your prices, it only shows you notifications when conditions are met.
The notifications will appear in the following areas of PIE:
- Today's activity block of the Overview page
- Rate Manager page (both Table and List view) for the corresponding dates
- Accommodation Details popup window (accessible by clicking on a date in Rate Manager) under the Rules & Alerts tab
Learn more about Rules and Alerts - Creating/Editing a Compset Based Alert.
The occupancy-based rules are triggered by the changes in your occupancy and affect your daily rates. You can set up PIE to increase/decrease all or specific accommodations' rates once the occupancy reaches a certain percentage.
You can also set a rule to just suggest those price changes, which you will have to manually accept in the Rate Manager, or to automatically change your prices based on the parameters you set in the rule.
Learn more: Creating/Editing an Occupancy Based Rule/Alert.
Add Events to indicate dates which are expected to generate demand for your property, like a large concert or the World Cup. You can also add in-house Events like group meetings, workshops or celebrations that are held at the property.
Once events are added, they will appear in the following areas:
- Overview page (Upcoming Events section)
- Rate Manager (Events row under the calendar dates)
- Events page will populate a full list of created events. You can search from this list using the Filter at the top of the page.
After you have implemented the steps above, you can now see all the data populated in different pages that will help you make more informed pricing decisions and generate more revenue.
Learn more about Events.
Make sure to check PIE often (at least a few times a day) to review your booking dynamics, performance data, your competitors’ rates and any alerts generated by the system.
