Powered by AI, ChatGPT can be used to provide insight into which specials to run at the right time, and when to potentially increase your rates - its a convenient yield management tool.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) program. You ask it something and it uses the power of the internet to give you an answer or, in this case, analyse your booking information.
What is yield management
Yield management is a pricing strategy to increase revenue. It's about selling the right product (your rooms) to the right customer at the right time and price. It involves analysing demand and market information to adjust prices, ensuring the best return from your rooms.
Download your Booking Summary
Go to your Online Calendar and select 'Reports'.
For your Booking Summary report:
- Adjust the date range to cover a full year.
- Click on 'Run Reports'.
Deciding on the date range:
Extracting the data for a full year ensures that you have all the booking statistics, covering all travel seasons.
Your report is downloaded onto your computer. Make sure that the report is saved in the .xlsx or .csv format.
Using ChatGPT
ChatGPT is programmed to do as its asked, so you're going to ask it to analyse your booking data.
The instructions below will prompt ChatGPT to review and analyse your Booking Summary report.
Copy this text:
Analyze my booking Excel file (deduplicate by Booking ID).
“Own web site” in Source = direct bookings; ignore Type column.
Find quietest periods (fewest bookings) and create a plan using promo codes, % discounts, last-minute, early-bird, and minimum stay offers to fill quietest periods.
Then find busiest periods and suggestions to boost revenue. Base all recommendations only on this dataset. Give it in a simple format that is easy to read and interpret. present findings in a table and not on a spreadsheet.
Go to ChatGPT
Use this link to open ChatGPT in a new tab or window
- Paste the copied text into the 'Ask anything' field.
- Click 'Add photos & files'.
Select and upload your Booking Summary report by:
- Selecting the Booking Summary report you downloaded.
- Clicking on 'Open'.
Your booking summary file will show as attached.
- Click on the 'Send' button.
This may take a moment or two!
ChatGPT will now review your request and analyse the information in your Booking Summary report.
Allow a few minutes for it to process your request.
Review the results
ChatGPT is an adaptive AI system. This means it doesn’t produce one fixed answer for everyone. Instead, its responses are shaped by the information provided in each conversation, the user’s wording, context, goals, and even their level of expertise. Two people can ask the same question in slightly different ways and receive different outputs. This is not because ChatGPT is inconsistent, but because it is designed to tailor its guidance to the individual.
ChatGPT will reply with its findings and recommendations, based on the information in your Booking Summary report. The information provided will guide you on making decisions based on your booking performance and data from the date range selected (the previous year in this case).
Read through the response and be sure to look out for any information available to download. In many cases, ChatGPT will provide a document for download.
Example of recommendations
In our example, ChatGPT provided these recommendations.
Here its easy to see:
- quiet and busy months
- practical strategies to get the most out of these seasons
- potential to increase revenue
Read though the recommendations in the reply as well to gain further insight. Make sure the recommendations will work for you before you apply these because ChatGPT can get things wrong sometimes.
