For a video walkthrough of this, please view my video here: https://www.loom.com/share/6bf780fa592546e592aa00faf76b7cbe
A great place to start when trying to improve your parity would be to investigate specific undercuts found across OTA websites and metasearch.
Identifying problem itineraries
If you click into the ‘Parity table’ section of the Triptease Parity product, you’ll see searched itineraries and pricing compared to OTAs. It’s colour coded to show you when your hotel is in parity, undercut or cheaper direct.
The most recent prices we've tracked for each vendor is shown in the table. The 'Searches' column shows you how many times guests have searched for that itinerary in the time period so you can cross reference your parity with search demand.
You can sort the table by itinerary, number of searches and direct price.
You can also use the filters to show the prices we've seen across all OTAs bidding against your property on metasearch. You might be surprised by how many OTAs are bidding against your hotel on meta!
Investigating specific itineraries
Once you've identified an undercut that you want to investigate further, simply click the row in the table, and you'll be shown a bunch more relevant information about each of the prices that we've seen.
In the sidebar that opens, you'll see a full breakdown of the prices for all the OTAs we've tracked along with information regarding:
The direct room and rate data that corresponds to the direct price displayed (note, we always compare with the cheapest available OTA rate we find, regardless of room type)
The original price we saw on the OTA site (we convert prices to your display currency for easier comparison, but the price we see on the OTA is sometimes in a different currency)
When we saw the price
Coming soon: which country we scraped the price from
Additionally, we provide links to the direct website and OTA sites so you can easily investigate these itineraries to see if the prices have changed since we reported the undercut.
We also take screenshots of OTA websites which you can use as evidence if reporting the undercut as a violation of your OTA partner agreement to your OTA account manager (please note, we don't currently support taking screenshots of Google metasearch)
Rate evolution analysis
One last thing you can do in the sidebar is look into how your price and OTA prices for that itinerary have evolved over time. To look at this, simply click the 'View historic prices' button.
Here you can view how prices for this itinerary have evolved over time. Hover over the name of the OTA in the legend to highlight the prices for that OTA.
This graph is particularly helpful when trying to work out when and how undercuts might have been introduced, for example as the result of making a change to your rateplan via the channel manager, or switching on an OTA feature such as VCC payments or mobile discounts.