Rate Loading is a quick and easy way to adjust the rates offered through a particular 'agent channel'. See Understanding Agent Channels
If you simply want to increase or decrease your rack rate by a percentage to a specific Agent Channel, you can "load" the rate so that it is a % - /+ (higher or lower). You can thus have one price on your website and another to the Network partners and GDS systems.
For Example, If you were to use Rate Loading of -10% to a specific Agent, then the rate will appear 10% lower when 'viewed' by the Agent, offering 10% discount off the allocated rate. If one were to place a positive number, say 5, then the rate would appear 5% higher when 'viewed' by the Agent, offering a 5% surcharge on the allocated rate.
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Yield Management Add-On Module- More Power in Allocations: An additional BookingCenter tool that can be added to your BookingCenter program is the Yield Management Module. The YMM is able to automate these 'rate loading' events based on occupancy and time conditions for your property, without requiring you to manually managed each rate and agent separately. This is very powerful tool to add to your BookingCenter package and can make rate management conform to your business goals easily and seamlessly.
See: http://www.bookingcenter.com/interfaces-and-modules/yield-management/ for details.
Rate Loading for Agents:
- Go to SETUP | AGENTS | AGENT RELATIONSHIPS
- Find the Agent. See Agents
- Look at the field called 'Rate Loading' on the Agent . If you place a 10% in that field, then the rates will be increased by 10% when they go to the distribution channel. If you were to place a -5%, then the rates would be decreased by 5% when they go to that channel. This is an easy way to grossly affect all rates going to an Agent channel.
- Once done, click 'Change' to save the changes.
- All OTA Contract Rates Agents are denoted by three and four alpha-numeric agent codes. For OTA Contract Rates, you may be required to negatively Net Load your rack rates a certain percentage. This allows the OTA to buy your rooms for the discounted rate. This discount is in agreement with your OTA Contract and will only happen with Expedia Merchang, Priceline, Hotwire, and Orbitz. For Booking.com and Expedia Retail, you will not negatively or positively net load at all. If you do, this will result in an error message.
Rate Loading for GDS and OTA channels.
If you simply want to increase or decrease your rack rate by a percentage to the GDS system (which encompasses Online Travel Agents and Travel Agent Databases), you can "load" the rate so that BookingCenter send them as a % - /+ (higher or lower) in order to compensate for the GDS and travel agent commission. You can thus have one price on your website and another to the Network partners and GDS systems.
- Go to SETUP | AGENTS | AGENT RELATIONSHIPS
- Find the Agent WR See Agents
- Look at the field called 'Rate Loading' on the Agent WR screen. If you place a 10% in that field, then the rates will be increased by 10% when they go to the distribution channel. If you were to place a -5%, then the rates would be decreased by 5% when they go to that channel. This is an easy way to grossly affect all rates going to an Agent channel.
- Once done, click 'Change' to save the changes.
- All OTA Contract Rates Agents are denoted by three and four alpha-numeric agent codes. For OTA Contract Rates, you may be required to negatively Net Load your rack rates a certain percentage. This allows the OTA to buy your rooms for the discounted rate. This discount is in agreement with your OTA Contract and will only happen with Expedia Merchang, Priceline, Hotwire, and Orbitz. For Booking.com and Expedia Retail, you will not negatively or positively net load at all. If you do, this will result in an error message.
If you wish to manually select different rates for different rooms in the GDS system and not have the rate loading apply to the entire agent, do the following:
- Find the Agent WR and under the 'Allocate Rate' drop down for the Room Type, choose the Rate that you want published to the GDS system. See Allocate Room Types
- Once this has been done for ALL ROOM TYPES, click 'Update All' to save the changes. Now, when a viewer queries for your rooms through any of these Agents, they will see the rates and rooms you made available to them.
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