The Machefert Group is one of the leading independent hotel groups in France. Paris is their hub, with 19 hotels, seven bars and five restaurants, as well as a 5* property in Saint-Tropez and a resort in Marrakech. Their eclectic, boutique style and personal touch – they’re still a family-run business – makes them one of the industry’s leading lights.

We spent some time catching up with Hugh Thomson, Yield Manager, about how they went about transforming their approach to revenue management.

Old school frustrations

The main issue with our old revenue management setup was the response time. We didn’t have an RMS before we switched to Pace, now FLYR for Hospitality, so we were using our own internal charts and data to try evaluate price changes and demand. That meant we were looking at historic data and performance relating to pick-up levels and the CompSet of each hotel, which was far from optimal.

“We’ve seen some big revenue improvements since switching to Pace (FLYR for Hospitality) – some of our hotels have seen an average increase of 14% in ADR and 20% in room revenue.”

We tested two other products while shopping for an RMS and Pace, (FLYR for Hospitality) stood out because it had the ability to push prices to the PMS in real time, which allowed us to be able to analyse demand fast and push price changes at the same time and in the same place.

We were spending at least 8 hours every week making manual price modifications and, with Pace (FLYR for Hospitality) that process immediately became way easier and that time was cut down by about 30%.

But once we switched on automated pricing things really took off. The strategy was altered to allow the system to make most changes, whilst we controlled seasonality through the minimum and maximum price settings. Dates can still be changed manually whenever we need but it is much less frequent than before.

Rapid implementation

We had a lot of hotels to plug in and connecting Pace, (FLYR for Hospitality) to our PMS was straight forward and a lot simpler than the other solutions we had tested, hands down.
Furthermore, Pace (FLYR for Hospitality) looks great visually – it’s simple, ergonomic and not overwhelming, which was definitely the case for one of the competitors!

“Previously we would spend up to 4 hours a day preparing, extracting and analysing data for reports and sometimes even longer.”

Instant results

We’ve seen some big revenue improvements since switching to Pace (FLYR for Hospitality) – some of our hotels have seen an average increase of 14% in ADR and 20% in room revenue.

Automated pricing has really transformed our response time and ability to react to demand. But the Pace (FLYR for Hospitality) ‘Action’ tab also allows us to analyse the situation ad hoc and spot the dates that are receiving reservations and pick-up easily, which allows for price changes to be made fast. This in turn, allows us to react even faster.

Commercial Intelligence

We can now actually create personalised dashboards…and very fast. I love the ability to quickly modify the filters to study specific periods, and being able to select individual hotels and group them together if necessary.

For example, we can quickly view the pick-up for a specific selection of hotels or analyse total revenues and performance for a specific set. That means we can generate a bunch of reports off the back of Analytics that drill into areas like Pick-up, Revenues (historic & OTB & tag) and Lead Time.

In short, the dashboards are giving us more in-depth analyses and it’s all done very quickly. Previously we would spend up to 4 hours a day preparing, extracting, and analysing data for reports and sometimes even longer! Now it’s done in seconds so we can focus on the analysis!