Market Guide

The Market brings into Vezpa the data Booking.com gathers about your area and your property: how far in advance people book, what searchers are looking for, which countries they come from, how the average price is moving.

You get here from the Promotions screen, with the «Market» icon in the bar: the icon only appears once a download for your property has already succeeded. You reach Promotions from the Rates bar, entry «Promotions» (on a phone, from the tools menu). The same screen also shows up in Management on a computer, as a panel in the Manager's right-hand column: the expand button opens it full page, and this is it.

The five cards

On a phone the cards stack, on a tablet they sit in two columns, on a computer in three.

«Refresh» downloads the new numbers

The button in the bar asks Booking.com for updated data and rewrites the cards. While it works it turns into a spinner, and it cannot be tapped twice.

Market data moves slowly: a couple of checks a month is enough, and refreshing more often does not produce different numbers.

From the chart to the move

The Market on its own changes no price. Its signals feed the suggestions you find under Promotions — a mobile promotion if the area books from phones, an early or a last-minute one depending on the window — and they reach the automatic engine in the RMS as plain confirmation: on their own they move nothing, they can only reinforce a decision the engine has already taken on your own data.

The questions to answer by looking

• How far in advance do people book in my area? If most book close to the date, an early discount gives away margin. If they book months ahead, a last minute arrives too late.
• Where do the guests come from? That is the answer that says which languages your booking site and your messages really need.
• Where does my average price sit? The area's average price is not a target: it is a reference. Sitting above it can be right, if what you offer justifies it.

At the top of the page there are two things: the period the market is answering on, and the property the numbers belong to. If you run more than one property, the Market follows the one you picked in the selector, not the first in the list.

Under each card's title there is then its own date: the cards refresh one at a time and can be of different ages. A card that was never downloaded says so with «never updated».

The period is not a constant written in this guide: it travels with the data and it is printed on screen. If a card was downloaded with a different window, its line says so.

«No market data» is not a fault

An empty page, inviting you to tap «Refresh», has two possible causes and neither is a defect in the app:

• you have not refreshed yet: the first download is asked for by you, and on a property just connected there is nothing yet;
• Booking.com does not supply that data for your property: coverage is decided property by property, not area by area, and a property without a comparable set of competitors produces no demand figures.

Single cards can also stay empty one at a time: the demand card may say the data is not available for your property while the other four fill up, and those still hold. The sales statistics card, when it is missing, points you at Booking.com support or at your channel manager: that figure comes from the portal, not from Vezpa.

Who can read and who can refresh

The page opens from Promotions, so the roles that have the Rates bar reach it: Manager, Assistant and Revenue Manager. The panel in Management, on the other hand, is seen by the Manager alone, and only on a computer. On the server side reading the data is open to any authenticated account, while «Refresh» requires permission to write rates: without it the request is refused even to somebody who got here another way.

Demonstration properties

On demo accounts the real refresh does not run: a notice at the foot of the screen tells you. The cards stay full of sample data, so the page can still be explored.

If you run more than one property

The data is per property, not per company: two properties in two different areas have two different markets. The top of the page says which one you are looking at, and the refresh downloads that one's data.

• I tapped «Refresh» and the numbers are identical. Market data moves slowly: from one day to the next almost nothing changes. Look at the date under the card title to know whether the download went through.
• One card says «never updated» and the others do not. That is normal: they download one at a time, and one of them may not be available for your property.
• The whole page is empty. Either you have not refreshed yet, or Booking.com does not cover your property with this data. There is nothing to repair.
• The refresh fails. A notice appears at the foot of the screen. Try again later: the request goes through the channel manager and Booking.com, and either can be briefly unreachable.
• The area's average price is very different from mine. It is an average of properties that are not yours. It works as a reference, not as a target.
• I cannot find the «Market» icon. It sits in the Promotions bar, and it only appears once a download for your property has already succeeded: on a property that never refreshed it is not there yet. The roles that have the Rates bar reach it.
• I am on a demonstration account and the refresh does not run. That is expected: on test properties Booking.com is not queried.