Open Pricing

What is Open Pricing?

Open Pricing is a hotel revenue management strategy that prices every segment, channel, and room type independently — without tying rates to a Best Available Rate (BAR) ladder. Each part of a hotel's demand responds to its own signals, on its own timetable, without being chained to a single base rate.

How BAR-based pricing works — and where it breaks down

Traditional BAR pricing sets a base rate and applies fixed offsets from it. Loyalty rates are 10% below BAR. Packages are priced relative to BAR. Room types follow BAR up and down in lock-step. When BAR moves, everything moves with it.

That constraint was manageable when hotels had a handful of segments and rates were set manually once a week. It is not manageable now.

Hotels today manage dozens of segments, multiple room types, and distribution across channels with meaningfully different cost profiles. A BAR ladder applies the same logic across all of them. The result: when you protect BAR by closing lower-rated channels, you lose bookings in segments that would have been profitable at that price. When BAR holds steady, you leave revenue uncaptured at the top. The trade-off is built into the model.

How Open Pricing works in practice

With Open Pricing, the pricing engine evaluates demand at the segment, channel, and room type level — independently and simultaneously.

A segment with low demand can discount without affecting rates in a high-demand segment. A room type under compression can tighten on its own timetable. Direct channels can be priced to reflect their lower distribution cost without impacting OTA positioning. Promotions tighten automatically as demand builds, rather than requiring manual intervention.

The pricing strategy follows demand — not a ladder.

Why Open Pricing produces better revenue outcomes

The commercial case for Open Pricing over BAR-based pricing is precision. BAR pricing approximates. Open Pricing optimises.

Hotels using Open Pricing avoid two of the most common revenue leakage patterns in traditional pricing environments. First: leaving money on the table in compressed periods, because BAR-based systems move all rates together and often fail to capture the full willingness to pay at the top end. Second: closing out segments unnecessarily — turning away bookings that would have been profitable — because the only tool available was closing a channel to protect BAR.

Open Pricing removes both constraints. Premium segments and room types can price independently beyond the old BAR ceiling. Lower-rated segments can stay open and productive without undercutting overall rate strategy.

Open Pricing and GameChanger

Duetto invented Open Pricing. It is the pricing philosophy at the core of GameChanger, Duetto's revenue and pricing engine.

GameChanger prices demand independently across every segment, channel, and room type — continuously, in real time. Autopilot executes the strategy around the clock. The system also surfaces regrets and denials from direct booking channels as forward demand signals — giving revenue teams early visibility into where demand is forming before pickup reports confirm it.