Rate Loading

Rate Loading for Agents:

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. It's very easy:

• Find the Agent WR
• Look at the field called 'Network Loading' on the Agent WR screen. If you place a 8% in that field, then the rates will be increased by 8% 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 'Update All' 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 Priceline, Hotwire, Travelocity, and Orbitz.  For Booking.com and Expedia, 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.
• You may use also choose to use Network Loading for these rates as well.
• 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.

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/products/modules/yield_management.html for details.

If you wish to allocate special rates to Travel Agents, for example, or you do not wish to have 100% of your rooms displayed to OTA contracts (such as Expedia or Booking.com) do the following:

Go to the Agent Allocations section of BookingCenter's Members Area at: https://members.bookingcenter.com/site_agent_allocate.phtml.

• If you simply want to increase the rate by a percentage to all Travel Agents and the GDS systems, 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. It's very easy:
• Find the Agent WR
• Look at the field called 'Network Loading' on the Agent WR screen. If you place a 8% in that field, then the rates will be increased by 8% 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 'Update All' to save the changes.
• if you desire to 'rate load' to a specififc OTA (such as Expedia or Booking.com), then choose the Agent for that specific OTA (such as EQR for Expedia) and rate load that agent's rate(s).  This can be done for a single Agent of for all Agents.

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