When you make a change to your rate strategies or rental rate settings, you want to see the results of that change immediately. With Rategenie, there’s no waiting around – adjustments are queued up and pushed to your channels in record time!
How do I get the rates in my calendar to change/update?
There are a few different ways for you to manually trigger an update of the rates in your calendar:
- Create a new rate strategy.
- Modify an existing strategy.
- Add or edit a rule in your strategy.
- Save a change to the rate settings in your rental.
- Change the location of your rental.
- Add a manual rate to your rental.
If you want to have Rategenie update the rates for a single rental, you’ll have to change at least one of the settings for that specific rental, or create a new manual rate.
If you wish to generate new rates for multiple rentals, then you can save changes to any strategy associated with those rentals.
In both cases, once a change has been saved, Rategenie goes right to work calculating new nightly rates for any affected rentals.
How long should I wait to see the calendar update?
Rategenie responds immediately to changes in your rental settings and strategies, but calculating new rates is not instantaneous. This is a difficult task even for the most powerful mainframes. Depending on the complexity of your rates setup, you might have to wait up to a few minutes for Rategenie to finish generating the new nightly rates for the specified rentals.
This ensures accuracy and precision in each night’s rates. When we say “The Perfect Price, Everyday,” we really mean it.
After giving Rategenie a brief moment to calculate the new nightly rates, it’s time to refresh the rates calendar to get a better look at your new rates. We’ve made this step extremely simple for you:
At the top of each rates calendar is a little Refresh rates now button, that does exactly what it’s name says. By clicking on this button, your rates calendar will be refreshed immediately.
If Rategenie has finished calculating the updated nightly rates, you will be able to see those changes reflected on the calendar. If the rates have not changed, it means that Rategenie is not yet finished generating and verifying your new rates, so you should wait a little bit longer.
Again, the more complex your rate strategy and settings, and the more rentals being updated at a time, the more time you should allow for Rategenie to work its magic.
How can guests see my new rates?
Rategenie automatically pushes your rates daily, in spite of manual adjustments. This ensures that any changes your strategy makes in reaction to changed conditions (event detected, booking made, etc) will go live on time and be effective.
Once you have new rates generated in your calendar, Rategenie will also begin the process of pushing those newly-generated nightly rates to your rental channel calendar. This will occur if a few different conditions are met first.
- Your account sync switch is turned on.
- Sync is turned on for your rental.
- The sync switch for your channel listing is turned on.
If these three conditions are satisfied, then Rategenie will queue a rate push for any listings with synchronization turned on for your rental.
As is the case with generating a rates update in the rate calendar, you must allow a brief moment for Rategenie to perform the task of pushing rates. Depending on the channel and the amount of other users pushing rates at the same time, you might have to allow a few minutes or more for the rate push to be completed.
Some channels have will also require your rate pushes to be queued, as a consequence of your overall channel account activity. Never fear — your rates will push eventually, thanks to Rategenie’s clever synchronization service. Not only will your rates push once the queue has been processed, but any additional changes and updates to your rates that were made while the rate push was queued will also be pushed to the listing at that time.
This guarantees that your most recent rates are always pushed to your channel, where your guest can see the new pricing as they book your room.
What should I do next?
You’ve given Rategenie some time to process your adjustments, update your calendar, and push the new rates to your channel listings – what comes next? We always strongly recommend checking your channel rates for accuracy after any rate push. The reason for this is two-fold.
- You want to ensure that your listing is configured correctly to accept the rates that are being pushed from Rategenie.
- It is always important to make sure there was not an error in the rate push.
With regards to the first point, Rategenie does not have access to your channel account configuration. As a result, it is critical to review the rates and availability calendar on your channel to verify that the rates display correctly.
If you discover any discrepancies between the rates on your channel, and the rates in your Rategenie calendar, please check your listing details (on the channel) to confirm that you have your guest counts, additional guest fees, and currencies set to match what you have in your Rategenie rental settings and strategy details.
As far as the second point is concerned, nobody’s perfect. It is possible for errors to be returned by the channel connection during a rate push. This warning is provided in the activity logs for the specified rate push. However, because rate pushes are queued, and not instantaneous, Rategenie cannot notify you immediately after you update your calendar rates.
Checking the rates on your listing calendar for accuracy is one way to stay on top of any potential issues with your channel rates. You’ll be able to quickly verify that the nightly rates visible in your channel calendar match those in your Rategenie calendar.
From start to finish, the full process from changing rates to seeing them updated on your channel usually takes less than a minute.
For complicated rates strategies and rules, allow a slightly longer grace period for the process to be completed.
While Rategenie is designed to be a convenient “set it and forget it” application, we encourage our users to double-check their live listings to ensure they’re receiving properly.