Impact
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My Role
I collaborated closely with cross-functional product and engineering teams to define and design Dynamic Pricing—a B2B AI tool that dynamically adjusts hotel room rates across OTAs to optimize occupancy and profitability. My role focused on demystifying complex predictive models for hotel managers, creating an intuitive dashboard experience that balances automated pricing intelligence with granular user control.
Problem statement
Hotels need a smarter way to price rooms across their entire inventory because manually balancing conversion and rate optimization across many room types and days is too complex to do well by hand — yet they still need to trust and control the final decision.
Research Findings
We interviewed hotel owners operating a range of property types across Japan—business hotels, ryokans, and luxury hotels—to understand how they approach room pricing. Despite their differences in scale and guest experience, one issue came up universally: pricing is hard to get right.
The Problems
- No clear answer on optimal price. Owners lack a reliable way to know what a room should be priced at on any given night to balance profit and occupancy.
- Overwhelming volume of combinations. With multiple rooms, plans, and dates in play, the sheer number of price points is difficult to track and manage.
- Too many variables, too much cognitive load. Day of week, seasonality, location, competitor pricing, and other factors all influence the “right” price—forcing owners to juggle far more than they can reasonably process manually.
- High time cost. Researching market rates and updating prices accordingly consumes significant time and effort that owners would rather spend elsewhere.
Who are the users?
The people responsible for setting hotel and ryokan room prices generally fall into two roles: Hotel/Ryokan Owners, who often manage pricing directly alongside running daily operations, and Revenue Managers, who are dedicated to pricing and revenue strategy at larger properties. Based on our research, we distilled these users into the following personas
Goal
I collaborated closely with cross-functional product and engineering teams to define and design Dynamic Pricing—a B2B AI tool that dynamically adjusts hotel room rates across OTAs to optimize occupancy and profitability. My role focused on demystifying complex predictive models for hotel managers, creating an intuitive dashboard experience that balances automated pricing intelligence with granular user control.
Solving the Problem
Ideas & Solutions:
- Provide a calendar-like view for room prices, so that a user can easily find the price of any room(s) for any specific day
Show breakdowns of how AI calculated the room price for prices computed from AI pricing models
Show indicators that identify the pricing model being applied to a room(s) on any day
Easily allow users to change the pricing model and room price preferences for any room(s) for any day or date range
A list view of all room prices with search filters for date, pax size, prices, discounts, etc…
Things to keep in mind…
Users want to see a lot of information in a limited space, but the UI has to be simple and easy to read at the same time
Users have to update many prices per day, so it is important that operations take few mouse clicks to perform
Because there is a lot of price information, users want to be sure that they don’t make mistakes when updating the price of a room(s)
The UI must accommodate smaller displays (i.e. 1280 x 720), as some users have small monitors,
Wireframes
The plan was to lay out the room prices for each day in a calendar-like view. User can scroll horizontally to see room prices for any date.
The plan was to lay out the room prices for each day in a calendar-like view. User can scroll horizontally to see room prices for any date.
Final Designs
Calendar view of rooms
On this page, users can view all room prices for any date
Room Pricing Model
Here, users can change the pricing model for any number of rooms for any date range. Selected rooms are highlighted so that users can preview which rooms will be updated.
Breakdown of AI Price Computation
Users can see a breakdown of how the AI computed the price of a room by clicking on any room price item.
Listview of Room Prices & Plans
Lastly, users can search for any room or plan and their pricing adjustments in a list view.
Impact & Validation
The plan was to lay out the room prices for each day in a calendar-like view. User can scroll horizontally to see room prices for any date.