In conversation with Nauman Tahir, revenue manager at the Tahir Group

Please introduce yourself briefly and tell us what makes your hotel or host role stand out.
Tahir Investments GmbH has been operating on the German hotel market since 2018 with its “bestprice Hotel Eschweiler”. Since then, the company has successfully expanded and acquired more houses. The houses are initially thoroughly renovated and brought to a uniform standard: All rooms are upgraded with comfortable box-spring beds. For information and pastime, guests are provided with at least 32-inch flat-screen TVs and nationwide, free WiFi. Our goal is to offer our guests excellent value for money without sacrificing service.

‍

Did you or how did you do revenue management before you switched to happyhotel?
Happyhotel prepared a list of event dates once a year. Managing directors and managers coordinated the prices together. The document figures from previous years/months were analysed and new prices were set. As soon as this was done, they were all posted online and approved. After that, the price was only changed selectively on certain days, although upward price changes rarely took place.
A last minute discount was only given for low bookings. However, one or the other day was certainly overlooked.

‍

What were the decision criteria for Happyhotel?
Pricing the rooms effectively was too time-consuming. Due to our strong expansion in recent years, there was simply no time to adjust prices manually. The result: Losses due to low prices on popular event days. And so are losses due to too high prices on “unpopular” travel days.

‍

How does Happyhotel make everyday life easier for you?
happyhotel helps us to automatically adjust prices based on occupancy and booking volumes in the region. I simply determine for each season which minimum and maximum price should be used, as well as the corresponding base price. Happyhotel does everything else for us.

‍

Which feature do you like best?
Definitely the autopilot. It saves us a lot of time. The reaction and sensitivity (conservative, aggressive, etc.) can be adjusted and changed. Adjust the bulk update over time. I've worked with many systems, channel managers, etc. However, it has never been as clear and simple as Happyhotel.

‍

What does the dynamic pricing process look like for you NOW?
Actually, there is currently only a random check to see whether Happyhotel is working correctly. If necessary, we manually adjust the prices up and down, but this only happens in rare cases. Normally, the autopilot controls everything by itself.

‍

How has your average working day changed since the integration of happyhotel?
We now have more time to optimize hotels in other areas. Our housekeeping and maintenance, for example, has significantly improved. As a result of the fact that the respective managers no longer have to keep an eye on prices, they can dedicate their time more to the guests and thus make their stay as pleasant as possible.

‍

Have you already made any noticeable additional sales and if so, by what percentage have you been able to increase your turnover through happyhotel?
Every month is currently a record month. This is due to the setbacks caused by the pandemic and the growth we have experienced. I say just under 8-10% out of gut feeling without looking at the figures. You can see really big differences over the weekend, so that a double room, which normally costs 65€ per person with us, is also bought for 87€ per person, for example.

‍