What is the Yield Rules feature?
Yield rules is a feature in your channel manager that automates the sale of your most profitable rooms on your most profitable channels during demand fluctuations.
It allows you to quickly and easily set rules for maximising margins and drive more profit by:
Only allowing the sale of high-yield room rates (rates with the highest return) when availability is low and demand is high.
Setting availability limits to reduce the risk of overselling low-yield rooms (rates with the lowest return). For example, in the case of unexpected demand during the low season.
Setting availability limits on the number of room types or packages available on particular channels, helping to manage guest acquisition costs via third-party channels and reduce the risk of overbookings or bulk accommodation purchases.
You can filter the rules by rule types, room types, rate plans and booking channels. It won’t affect the inventory grid in the booking channels and you can still update the availability as per normal in the inventory grid.
What are the benefits of Yield rules?
The primary benefit of Yield rules is to help you to maximise profits by enabling a greater gross margin as demand fluctuates. Yield rules help you to easily create rules that will automatically adjust and optimise availability across your distribution channels to maximise profit per available room.
An additional benefit is the peace of mind of eliminating the risk of overselling limited availability offers, such as packages with a limited number of availability.
Applying yield rules are particularly beneficial during busy periods of high demand when you want to maximise return, but are stretched for time to manage your rates. Or, in the low season, when there is an influx of unexpected demand and you don’t want to miss out on maximising rates.
Yield rules in the channel manager
There are four types of yield rules in the channel manager:
Automatic closure
Selling limit
Availability limit (amount)
Availability limit (percentage)
Automatic closure
The automatic closure rule applies a “stop sell” to selected room rates when the room type availability reaches a set threshold. This can be used when you want to close out low-yield (low-profit margin) room rates when demand is high and availability low.
Example: If you have a low-yield room rate, such as a “single room - midweek super saver” and a high-yield room rate such as “single room - standard rate”, you can set a rule that will allow the sale of both while availability is high, and apply a “stop sell” to the low-yield room rate when availability is low.
Selling limit
The Selling limit rule applies a “stop sell” to selected room rates once a particular rate plan has been sold a set amount of times, effectively capping the sales of a particular combination of rooms and rates. By placing a cap on certain combinations of rooms and rates, you can eliminate the risk of overselling particular offers.
Example: You have a “champagne and breakfast” package that includes accommodation and a daily champagne bottle with breakfast. If you can, or only want to provide a limited number of champagne bottles each day, you can set a selling limit on this package to prevent overbookings/overselling of the particular package.
Availability limit (amount)
The Availability limit (amount) rule limits the number of room types distributed on your select bookings channels to a set amount. The availability limit gives you more control over the sale of your inventory, helping to shield you from over-bookings and bulk accommodation reservations on particular booking channels.
Example: Your hotel has 100 rooms available for a given room type on any given day, and this room type inventory is fully available across all booking channels. There's a risk that all 100 rooms could be booked at once, at a less than optimal rate. To eliminate this risk, you could set the availability limit (amount) to 10, so that only 10 rooms of a given room type can be booked on any channel, at any time. As rooms are booked across your booking channels, inventory is topped up to 10 until fewer than 10 rooms remain.
Availability limit (percentage)
The availability limit (percentage) limits the number of available room types distributed on your booking channels to a percentage of the available inventory. This gives you more control over which channels you sell your inventory and helps to avoid overbookings and bulk accommodation reservations.
Example: Your hotel has 100 rooms available for a given room type on any given day. If this room type inventory is fully available on all booking channels there is a risk that all 100 rooms could be booked at once, at a less than optimal rate. To eliminate this risk, you could set the availability limit (percentage) to 10%, so that only 10% of your available rooms can be booked on any channel at any time. As rooms are booked across your channels, the inventory is re-calculated.
Please note: The availability limit (percentage) will always round down. For example, if you have set a rule to restrict the percentage of a room type availability advertised to 10%, and you have 17 rooms available for the given date, this would theoretically equate to 1.7 rooms. The rounding down means that only 1 room will be advertised.
Enable yield rules in your channel manager
Please note: The rules Automatic closure, Availability limit (amount) and Availability limit (percentage) are set on a room-type basis.
The Selling limit rule is set on a rate-plan basis.
You can activate the Yield Rules via toggle that appears on the Property Settings page
Create a yield rule
Click on the Yield rules tab
Click on the New rule button on the right-hand side of the screen
Click on the type of yield rule you wish to create from the pop-up window
Complete the following steps
Step 1
Enter the rule name
Select the room types or rate plans to which you want to apply the rule
Click on Next to go to Step 2
Step 2 for Automatic closure
Step 2 for Selling limit
Step 2 for Availability limit (amount)
Step 2 for Availability limit (percentage)
Step 2 for Automatic closure
Enter a numeric value to set your threshold.
When the availability reaches this value, the automatic closure will be applied to the selected room types.
Click on Next to go to Step 3
Step 2 for Selling limit
Enter a numeric value to limit your selected rate plans to only be sold a set amount of times.
When the number of rate plans sold reaches this value, a “stop sell” will be applied to the selected rate plans.
Click on Next to go to Step 3
Please note: The limit counts total sales of the rate plan on all room types this rate plan is linked to.
Example: If a standard room called “champagne and breakfast package” is sold 2 times and a double room champagne and breakfast package” is sold 1 time, this counts as 3 towards the selling limit.
Step 2 for Availability limit (amount)
Enter a numeric value to restrict the amount of availability advertised on selected channels.
Your room types will never be advertised more than the value entered here on selected channels.
Click on Next to go to Step 3
Step 2 for Availability limit (percentage)
Enter a percentage value to restrict availability advertised on selected channels.
Your room types will never be advertised more than the percentage value entered here on selected channels.
Click on Next to go to Step 3
Step 3
Where applicable, select room types, rate plans and channels to apply the rules.
Click on Next to go to Step 4
Please note: For Automatic closure, the rule will be applied to all the room rates associated to the rate plans selected here.
Step 4
Select a date range to apply the rule. Options are:
Selecting “Always” means that the rule will always be active for all dates in the future.
Selecting “Date range” means you will need to select a start date and an end date from the calendar to define a date range.
You can also select days of the week to apply the rule.
Click on Finish to create the yield rule.
Edit a yield rule
To edit a yield rule:
Click on Yield rules. All the rules are listed on this page.
Select the Edit link in front of the rule you want to edit. An edit rule pop-up window appears.
When you are done with editing the rule, click on Finish to save and apply the changes.
Delete a yield rule
Please note: deleting a yield rule will remove any restrictions that have been applied by the rule. The affected room rates or room types will be re-opened for sale without restrictions.
To delete a yield rule:
Click on Yield rules. All the rules will be listed on this page.
To delete a rule, click on the rule you want to delete and select Delete from the drop-down list. A confirmation pop-up window appears (see image underneath).
Click on Delete to confirm.
To edit a rule, select the Edit link in front of the rule you want to edit. An edit rule pop-up window appears.
When you are done with the editing the rule, click on Finish to save the changes.
The deleted rule will no longer appear under Yield rules and will be deleted permanently.