I think that we are discussing about the most important low cost group ever created. During my research about the EasyGroup, I found a lot of words with a strong meaning to describe it as “The Easy Empire”. In fact the EasyGroup is a private investment owned by one man: Stelios Haji-Ioannou. He is a Greek entrepreneur of 40 years old who started the EasyGroup in 1995 by founding the low cost airline company easyJet. But know the easyGroup is very huge and divided in 17 departments: easyJet, easyInternetcafe, easyCar, easyValue, easyMoney, easyCinema, easyBus, easyHotel, easy4men, easyJobs, easyPizza, easyMusic, easyCruise, easyMobile, easyWatch, easyVan, easyOffice.
It is an evidence this group is a huge success. And I will try to indentify for witch reasons:
- They built a big identity
- they use one color very attractive
- They are using simple name for each group
- They diversified their products at the maximum
We said that the group started with easyJet at the beginning it was a small company but today with their planes we are able to travel in all the biggest European capitals. With easyJet began a new concept, in fact you have no accommodations on board and only few services. This last point could be consider as a negative aspect but on the other hand with the concept it is “easy” to travel for many people who can not use traditional airline companies with more expensive prices.
Let’s have a look to easyHotel wich is one of the specialized hotel booking on the Internet. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, to create easyHotel studied the Japanese model. Indeed he found that customers are ready to stay in a room smaller than usual for a lower price. He took is inspiration from the “capsule hotels” of huge Japanese city by building very small rooms around 5m² and 9m². This kind of room is perfect for the short stay of periodic travelers like an “etap hotel” but I deeply think that it won’t be comfortable at all for business men who are very often obliged to use their room as a work place like an office. To my mind it is clear that easyGroup is following a way to reach certain goals: they clearly want to eliminate all their competitors by developing a huge branding.
Easy Hotels will benefits of lowest rate guarantee include:
- Serves as a great tool to beat the online discounters at their own game
- Such guarantees entice more consumers to book online
- Rate guarantees are great customer retention instruments
- Such guarantees have important psychological and promotional effects for consumers
- More and more, the guarantee is an expectation by online consumers
- Price guarantees have a great "word of mouth" effect.
There are four essential conditions for revenue management to be applicable:
- That there is a fixed amount of resources available for sale.
- That the resources sold are perishable. This means that there is a time limit to selling the resources, after which they cease to be of value.
- That different customers are willing to pay a different price for using the same amount of resources.
- Also is important to have direct access to consumers. The sales through intermediaries or wholesalers makes the process much harder to understand demand and often impossible to control and vary price.
Easy Hotels and Yield Management
- Increase revenue by maximizing occupancy and protecting rates when necessary
- To have access to accurate statistical reports both future, current and historical
- Detailed demand forecasting information to help with sales and marketing initiatives
- Competitor analysis on both the internet and GDS to help react to market influences
- Group analysis to help evaluate the impact group reservations have on occupancy and therefore revenue
- Series analysis which assess the impact a tour series contract will have on your property
- Access to reports and real time information on a group wide basis for Head Office personnel
