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RATE SHOPPER

Watch your whole competition, not just their rate

Sentinel AI checks Booking and Airbnb every day and brings back price, discount, occupancy and reviews for your competitive set, then turns that signal into triggers for your pricing rules and recommendations inside R2 OS.

What Sentinel AI rate shopping is

Rate shopping is the systematic monitoring of the public rates your competitors publish for future dates. Doing it by hand, opening Booking in incognito mode every morning, covers three or four hotels and a couple of dates; automated monitoring covers your entire competitive set, the hotels and rentals your guest actually compares you against, every single day.

Sentinel AI watches Booking and Airbnb and brings back more than the price: the struck-through discount, public occupancy signals, the rating and review count and the cancellation policy of each competitor. It samples the dates that actually move the rate, not all 365, to give you a big-hotel signal at a fraction of the cost, and stores everything as history.

How you watch a whole market

Price, occupancy and reputation for your competitive set, wired into your decisions inside R2 OS.

YOUR COMP SET

Your competitive set, date by date

Define the hotels and rentals you truly compete against and see their nightly rate and struck-through price for every future date, next to yours. More useful than knowing what a rival charges is knowing where you land: highest, lowest or mid-range for each date.

  • Rate, discount and cancellation policy per competitor
  • Your position within the range, not just the absolute number
BEYOND PRICE

Occupancy and reviews of the set

A nearly full competitor holding a low rate tells you one story; an empty one raising prices tells you another. Sentinel crosses public occupancy signals with the rating and review volume of each rival, because a hotel with a far better reputation can charge more without taking your demand.

  • Public signals of how full each rival is
  • Do not lower your price if your reviews are better
FORWARD-LOOKING

A calendar of future rates

The set rates are laid over a forward calendar, so you spot when your competitors start raising for a holiday weekend, a conference or a concert weekend. If the market moves for a date and you do not, you find out weeks in advance, not after you sold cheap.

  • Spots set movements for specific dates
  • React before the market settles without you
SMART SAMPLING

The dates that move the rate

Seeing the market like a big hotel no longer costs a fortune. Sentinel concentrates sampling on the booking windows and dates where the rate is actually decided, instead of sweeping 365 days with the same intensity, and delivers the same signal at a fraction of the cost.

  • More frequency where the rate is decided
  • Coverage by lead time, from last minute to the long window
HISTORY

Every move is on record

Everything captured is stored as history: you see how competitor prices for a given date evolved over time, when they raised, when they slashed and how you responded. Reading the market stops being a snapshot and becomes an auditable timeline.

  • Rate evolution per date, yours and the set
  • Every data point with its capture date, verifiable
ACTION

The signal feeds your rules

The competitor price does not end in a report: it enters the Sentinel AI rules engine as a trigger. You write “if the set average rises 15%, raise me 8%” and the recommendations arrive explained, within your floors and ceilings, for you to approve with one click.

  • Rival moves fire rules you wrote yourself
  • No recommendation crosses your price limits
THE SENTINEL DIFFERENCE

Rate shoppers sell you the data and the data dies in a dashboard nobody acts on. In Sentinel AI the competitor rate feeds your pricing rules and recommendations directly, inside the same system where you run the hotel.

Connected monitoring vs. the traditional approach

Why a rate shopper inside your system beats a standalone tool.

SENTINEL AIManual checkingStandalone rate shopper
The whole competitive set, every day
Occupancy and reviews, beyond price
History of every captured rate
The signal fires your pricing rules
Recommendations inside the same system
No exporting or re-typing data

Frequently asked questions

What is a rate shopper?
A tool that automatically collects the public future rates of your competitors on channels like Booking and Airbnb, to compare them with yours date by date. It replaces the manual morning check with systematic monitoring of your whole set.
How do I choose my competitive set?
Start with four to eight properties with similar location, category and price range, the ones your guest actually compares before booking. Review it by season: the summer competitor is not always the winter one.
Is watching Airbnb useful if I run a hotel?
Yes in most urban and leisure markets: travelers compare hotels and apartments in the same search, and vacation rentals absorb demand on peak dates. Watching only hotels means seeing half your market.
Should I match the cheapest competitor?
No. The rival price is one more signal, alongside your occupancy, your booking momentum and your reputation; chasing the cheapest usually gives margin away. A price floor in Sentinel keeps a slashing rival from dragging you into a price war.
How often is the data refreshed?
Monitoring sweeps your future dates daily and concentrates sampling on the dates that truly move the rate, not all 365 equally. That is how you get a big-hotel signal at a fraction of the cost.
Does the rate shopper decide my prices?
Not on its own. The competitor rate enters as a trigger for rules you wrote and for explained recommendations you approve, always within your price limits. Monitoring informs; the decision remains yours and is recorded.

PUT YOUR REVENUE TO WORK

Book a demo and see how Sentinel AI suggests the price of every night from your own data.