YieldPlanet has released a new feature in the Booking Engine. It allows the hotel to set up packages in one simple screen.

On a single screen, the hotel can enter the following parameters:

• minimum stay
• price for the package
• description of the package e.g: weekend with tour of the city
• valid dates for the package

and then the package can be shown in the Booking Engine.

The whole operation to set up a new package takes only a few minutes.

Brazilian are slightly different from other tourists. Having good weather all year round and fabulous beaches in their home country, they are rather interested in shopping, glamour and prestige  gastronomy, sports, historical and cultural attractions. In this context, hotels should gain a deep understanding of their behaviour, likes and dislikes in order to develop effective marketing strategies to target Brazilian travelers. 

7 things you should know about Brazilian travellers: 

1. They love shopping, To cater to the Brazilian traveler who is looking to buy consumer goods you can create exclusive shopping tourist packages. Many Brazilian guests rent cars to facilitate their shopping trips, so one of these packages may include valet parking; 
2. Numerous international flights, especially inter-continental, are overnight. Thus, guests from Brazil are early morning or late evening. Givingtchemthe possibility of early morning check-in or late night check-out will give your hotel an added-value; 
3. Complimentary breakfast is considered a staple in Brazilian culture, A complimentary continental breakfast will give you some extra points;
4. Brazilians take cleanliness seriously: ultra clean rooms are crucial to guest satisfaction;
5. Cheerfulness is Brazilian’s middle name:  Staff interactions will be appreciated. Having a Staff member to greet the group or individual in their language will be extremely well received; 
6. As Portuguese speakers on a Spanish continent, not all Brazilians speak English: localise your hotel website into Portuguese. Additionally, you can have Staff members having a working knowledge of Portuguese to cater to Brazilian guests;
7. Social media have  become a very influential channel. Blogs, forums, and social networks have become important platforms for sharing thoughts and opinions about travel destinations and hotel experiences. Make sure you don’t miss social media channels in your marketing strategy.

Airlines make over 1M fare changes per day to maximize revenue. YieldPlanet wants to bring this discipline to the hotel world, with the assistant of a newly revealed research project called Hotel Management Optimizer.

The HMO is a global product category innovation, allowing hoteliers for the first time to profit from advanced learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to optimize their revenue and profitability with an integrated tool.

YieldPlanet says: “The researchers will develop self-learning algorithms that adapt to changes in the environment which integrated with large numbers of external data sources and Big Data analysis will allow us to measure items that might influence hotel room pricing”.

This research offers a unique opportunity to optimize revenue management systems over thousands of hotels, which introduces some exciting challenges: handling differences in behaviors between different countries, cultures and climates; managing the uncertainty of competitive behavior; blending the sparsity of the data from a single hotel with the richness of a dataset that spans many hotels; and modeling the different ways that markets response to prices.

The YieldPlanet product development team plans to show off their early results mid 2017. The ultimate goal is to release HMO as a cloud software for hotels, in early 2018.

We believe that this form of artificial intelligence will prove especially useful for pricing recommendations. We are confident that we will be delivering results that have practical value to hotels and can improve their revenue and profitability within a 3-4 year time horizon.

The National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) has granted 5 MPLN from the European Union National Strategic Reference Framework to cover the HMO research. The project will be carried out under the Innovative Economy Operational Programme, priority axis 1. With the EU’s funding, YieldPlanet and its academic partners can research and develop a solution that will be more innovative and superior to what is currently available, putting YieldPlanet in the forefront of research and innovation.