Hotel Montecarlo

Tell us about your property

Hotel Montecarlo is a small, family-run establishment in the center of Milan. We acquired it in 2015 and fully renovated it. We offer eighteen rooms, including quadruples, triples, doubles, and singles, with a choice between standard and comfort versions, the latter featuring larger dimensions.

We are located in the Città Studi area, near the Polytechnic University of Milan and three healthcare facilities. As a result, our clientele is mixed, including business travelers, students, professors, and hospital visitors.

Our main challenge was competition: we are a small hotel surrounded by larger ones that inevitably managed their pricing better than we could. We needed to be as competitive as possible on all platforms, and with Smartpricing, we achieved that.

How did you manage rates before Smartpricing?

From 2015 to 2018, we managed everything manually using a traditional price list, including price updates on OTAs and our website. Then we introduced a property management system (PMS), and shortly before switching to Smartpricing, we had already started using dynamic pricing through a PMS feature.

We set starting prices, which were then automatically adjusted based on the hotel’s occupancy: prices dropped when the hotel was empty and increased as occupancy rose. This automation was limited to that function, as the strategy was entirely set manually by us without considering other variables.

What convinced you to try and adopt Smartpricing?

Our challenge was competition: we are a small hotel surrounded by many larger hotels that inevitably managed their pricing better than we could. We needed to be as competitive as possible on all platforms, and with Smartpricing, we achieved that.

What convinced us about Smartpricing was its extreme ease of use: every function of the software can be managed in seconds. We didn’t evaluate other competitors, nor did we have any doubts because this decision was the natural evolution of a change process we had already begun. We were very clear about what we were doing and how we needed to do it.

How has Smartpricing impacted your work?

The economic results we achieved were positive from the start, and one area where it helped us significantly was event monitoring. Being centrally located in a city like Milan, it was challenging for us to keep track of every new event, whereas Smartpricing doesn’t miss a single one.

Would you go back to managing rates as you did before Smartpricing?

No, we wouldn’t go back, especially since Smartpricing allows us to fine-tune prices based on our needs. Additionally, it is incredibly efficient in managing rates over the long and very long term—an aspect that was nearly impossible for us to optimize before.