Mumbai: RateGain Technologies, a provider of SaaS solutions for travel and hospitality, announced today the launch of Demand.AI, a self-serve unique SaaS solution powered by AI to help businesses track hyper-local demand at a city level and optimize their commercial strategy and ensure better ROI.
Increased volatility due to COVID-19 has made it difficult for any business to plan for the future. In addition, COVID-19 introduced an anomaly in demand forecasting by disrupting historical data trends, making it less reliable to understand how much demand they can expect in the next couple of months.
While the pandemic has been challenging for most industries that depend on tourism to drive revenues, the challenge has been more pronounced for teams that depend on historical data for planning their future demand, especially in hotels, airlines, vacation rentals, car rentals, destination-marketing organizations and tourism boards.
The inaccurate forecast also affects agencies that need to deliver localized outdoor campaigns and events dependent on footfall in a specific locality in the city, and hence the need for an easy-to-use and affordable platform has never been higher.
Demand.AI solves this by providing a demand index for a city ranked from 0 to 100 to help them understand how demand is evolving over 75 days. The easy-to-use and instantly accessible platform also allow the user to track demand for each locality using a map-view or a table view to compare which locality in each city will see higher demand.
Apart from the demand index, users will also understand which local events are creating a surge in demand, what type of demand would be coming into the city, and how it would affect hotel and vacation rental bookings.
Conceptualized and developed by RG Labs in six months, RateGain’s in-house incubator, the product leverages RateGain’s data lake that stores historical data and uses search, price points, and transactions data. This is further combined with other demand indicators such as active COVID cases, vaccination numbers, events, airline capacity, and bookings to give a forecast using AI, which is refreshed on a weekly basis.
Traditional Demand forecasting products are complex to derive insights and always have a medium to long incubation period, however as most of the industry tackles volatility and looks for accelerated digitization they cannot afford to wait to get actionable insights and this is where Demand.AI can help solve this immediate need for any business that depends on travel-induced demand.
Commenting on the launch, Bhanu Chopra, Founder, RateGain, said, “We know that today Travel & Tourism sector, creates 1 out of every four new jobs in the world according to WTTC. However, the inability of businesses to understand future travel demand and its impact on them creates poor customer experiences and lost revenue opportunities to recover from the pandemic. With Demand.AI, we are committed to make the future of travel clear and make it simple, clear, and instant, helping any travel-related businesses recover from the pandemic easily.”
