Simon Falkensteiner and Matthias Trenkwalder founded the startup RateBoard. And together with Berthold Agreiter, developed a software that digitally optimizes pricing for smaller hotels.
Simon Falkensteiner, whose name reveals tourism genes, explains, when it comes to pricing, hoteliers often leave a lot of money. Which is a touchy subject that is often decided on the guts. Also after studying for international business in Innsbruck, the son of FMTG boss Erich Falkensteiner, have his father Accompanied as an assistant, which was very challenging.
Since this junior teamed up with fellow student Matthias Trenkwalder and founded the startup RateBoard in 2015. Together with the computer scientist Berthold Agreiter, the young South Tyroleans developed a software that digitally controls pricing even for smaller individual hotels with up to 200 beds or groups with few properties. The startup already have 300 hotels under license as licensees, and have around 30 hotels in Carinthia and Styria 30 customers. Depending on the size of the hotel, a monthly license fee of 200 to 500 euros would apply.
Big Data for Flexible Pricing
In order to tame big data for flexible pricing in small but fine family hotels, they have had to do pioneering work. For two years they worked on the program. Because it deals with interfaces to existing hotel software and there are 40 to 50 different systems in Austria, Germany and Switzerland alone. The system records all data from the last two or three years, all of them reservations, booking types and much more. Thus, the system with the data supply and demand adjust an optimal pricing.
Price recommendation by pressing a button
Fixed prices are no longer available with RateBoard. Otherwise, often, the price, without knowing the circumstances of the current year, fixed in advance. With the help of this software, it can lower the price for the night at most. With RateBoard there are prices or discount prices. As the hotel price may increase. If Falkensteiner 90 percent fully booked three months in advance, he can sell the last ten percent at much higher prices.
The hotelier remains the sovereignty over the price. The customers can at the touch of a button to release the calculated price or change, even differentiated prices at Booking, Expedia, Tourism Association or the own homepage determine.
Falkensteiner is also a customer
In the meantime RateBoard with seat in Innsbruck has 17 coworkers. The Austrian Hotel Association recommends RateBoard and AWS supported the foundation. According to Falkensteiner they have brought business angels and investors so far about two million euros. And they see in Europe at individual hotels a huge market for their system. The target is 1000 hotel customers in three years. And the Falkensteiner Group? Well the father is also a customer.
Also published on Medium.