Screenshot of the LodgIQ One platform.
The platform features user-friendly ‘drag and drop’ icons that lets you do a ‘Market Forecast’, check out what is ‘On the Books’, and evaluate other crucial data points like flights, guest shopping behaviour, real-time news, and relative positioning to competitors including vacation rentals.
Buy a revenue management system, take data, download into Excel and create a bar chart… traditionally, this is what hotel owners and revenue managers are doing when it comes to making pricing decisions.
And yes, it is cumbersome.
“The approach is manual and dated. It hasn’t really changed from the 20th century,” said Fabian Bartnick, vice president, Asia Pacific, of New York-based startup LodgIQ (pronounced ‘logic’). “We want to change that.”
After securing US$5 million in seed funding led by Highgate Ventures, LodgIQ made its debut at ITB Berlin in March with its first revenue optimisation platform for the hospitality industry: LodgIQ RM.
Combining both revenue management and business intelligence, LodgIQ RM enables revenue managers to “visualise and analyse”, in Bartnick’s words.
The platform features user-friendly ‘drag and drop’ icons that lets you do a ‘Market Forecast’, check out what is ‘On the Books’, and evaluate other crucial data points like flights, guest shopping behaviour, real-time news, and relative positioning to competitors including vacation rentals.
LodgIQ RM also boasts advanced learning, or artificial intelligence, which “remembers” your habits. For instance, if you are inclined to check out the books first before anything else, the particilar icon will be enlarged over time.
“Think recommendations offered by Netflix, which change according to your habits,” suggested Bartnick.
Less than five months after its launch, LodgIQ has already welcomed 500 hotels – branded and non-branded – who have expressed interest in LodgIQ RM.
Yet the founders of LodgIQ realised there was a need for a more straightforward solution – one that catered to the “mum and pop hotels” who are often overlooked, in terms of revenue management systems.
Enter LodgIQ One – a platform that uses the same approach as LodgIQ RM, albeit a more simplified user interface.
Launched at ITB Asia 2016, LodgIQ One is targeted at independent/boutique hotels who may not need the complexities offered by its predecessor.
The product features several industry firsts: from a self onboarding process, which allows a hotelier to self-launch in any market, within minutes, to single pricing, allowing users to terminate the service at any time, and the lack of need for connectivity to an existing Propert Management System (PMS) or Central Reservation System (CRS).
“All you have to do is log in, and start using (the platform). You want to add your data? No problem. But there’s nothing to stop you from doing revenue management right away. It’s my job to take care of the complexity, the crazy calculations etc. Yours is to confirm the best rate for your hotel,” explained Bartnick who believes there will potentially high pick-up in markets like Bali, Australia and India, as well as any second-tier cities.
The essential difference between the two products?
“They’re different lids covering the same pot,” declared Bartnick.
“If you’re a bit more geeky, and you like to touch, play and do stuff – LodgIQ RM’s for you. Otherwise, for those who say ‘I really don’t have time and don’t want to be part of the journey’? LodgIQ One’s your answer.”