Hotel room type mapping is a vital technical process for the travel and hospitality industry that allows for consistent inventory management for your hotel.
By accurately mapping your room categories across the various platforms, including your website, Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) and competitor listings, you can ensure that the strategies you implement are effective and consistent across all room types.
Whether you’re working in short-term rentals, chain hotels, or boutique lodging, by leveraging data and automation, room type mapping ensures consistent, accurate room descriptions and competitive pricing for each booking at your property.
It also improves your overall customer experience by ensuring your guests receive their desired hotel booking.
In this article, we’ll take a look under the hood and explore the functionality, key features and benefits of room type mapping, along with an examination of tools that utilize room type mapping to make your life easier.
What is hotel room type mapping?
Room type mapping is the process of aligning different room categories across various systems, such as a hotel’s Property Management System (PMS), Channel Manager, OTAs, Global Distribution Systems (GDS), and market intelligence tools like rate shoppers.
Since different platforms use their own naming conventions and classifications for room types (e.g., “Deluxe Room” in the PMS might be referred to as “Standard Room” on an OTA), room type mapping ensures that these descriptions and categories are correctly synchronized.
This helps prevent messy data, and inventory mismatches when rooms are sold across multiple channels. Misleading bookers about room types, even unintentionally, can lead to dissatisfaction.
When implementing a room-type mapping strategy, or auditing your existing room type mapping you must consider any affected distribution channels and market intelligence tools you may utilize, including:
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Brand website
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OTAs
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Travel companies
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Bed banks
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Tour operators
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Wholesale suppliers
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Rate Shopping tools
Some systems allow for automation when undergoing a room-type mapping process. This often involves some level of machine learning where an algorithm can quickly automate this process for you, minimizing the manual labor involved so you can return your attention to other operative tasks.
Automation can be especially helpful when you consider how many room types a property can have.
Now, you might be saying to yourself – that’s great and all, but why should I undergo this process?
Benefits of hotel room type mapping
When you list a room on multiple OTAs, there can be different naming conventions, which can cause a single room type to have different names, and classifications on those various channels. Room type mapping allows you to match these differently named rooms back to your hotel’s own categories.
This is critical for effective inventory management and pricing. It prevents overbookings, ensures accurate availability across platforms, and simplifies rate adjustments.
By producing an accurate representation of your hotel’s room type inventory (such as your available rooms) you can more effectively forecast occupancy, implement tailored rate strategies across different room types and make more informed business decisions.
Accurate room type mapping at your hotel further enhances your revenue management strategy, enabling clear, strategic control over the visibility and pricing of each room category.
Manually completing this task would take an excessive amount of time. Automating this process not only saves you valuable time to focus on other tasks but also reduces costs by eliminating the need for guesswork in managing your room inventory.
Let’s look at a few more benefits of room type mapping for your lodging business.
Simple and targeted manageability
If you’ve ever wanted to know how best to price a particular room or wanted to get the scoop on your competitor’s pricing by room type, room type mapping makes it possible.
Maintain accurate room descriptions
When was the last time you came across an identical room across three platforms, with three different names?
A hotel may have a room that is described as a “2 Queen Premium Suite” in their PMS but is known as a “Double Queen Luxury Room” on one OTA, and then a “Two Queen Upgraded Suite” on another channel.
A room-type mapping solution can keep the descriptions of these various room types consistent across channels and minimize confusion surrounding different categories for the same room.
Different room type descriptions evoke different ideas about exactly what a room offers, which in turn affects how you price each room and how you view the offerings of your competitors.
Each minor difference paints a different picture, which can influence your room pricing strategy.
How does hotel room type mapping work?
The beauty of room mapping saves you from asking questions like “What’s the difference between a River View King Deluxe Room and a River View Double Room?” or “Are these the same room, but with different bed sizes?”
A room-type mapping algorithm analyzes room data (such as historical rates), the room descriptions themselves and generates thematic categories (for example, rooms with similar views, or identical bed types), and automatically groups different room types together.
This saves you precious time in determining which room type corresponds with another.
Let’s go through how room type mapping works behind the scenes in your tech software.
Recognize room types
For your room type to be recognized, the room-type mapping algorithm analyzes millions of historical price points, drawn from both your hotel and competitors.
From here, the algorithm extracts room name attributes as they are designated across different OTAs, along with average room rates, and their corresponding occupancy rates (the typical number of guests per room).
Grouping room types
This step is fairly straightforward.
Once the algorithm analyzes and extracts the data from existing datasets, it begins to combine or assign different rooms to different categories in a strategic and meaningful way to establish room categories.
Each of these categories is referred to as a room type group and is the foundation for any further room mapping and assignments that will continue to take place.
Machine learning models
At this stage, the focus is on training the existing room mapping algorithm – a machine learning model (MLM) – to recognize the room types, categories, and patterns for further mapping.A room mapping algorithm is frequently trained using the Bayesian inference algorithm, a machine learning technique that harnesses and learns from different types of information, especially data used in statistical analysis.
In the case of room mapping, the information used may include text-based features such as room names, rate names and possible occupancies to help with room type prediction.
Predict room type
The fourth and final step of the room type mapping process is that the algorithm begins its predictions of a room type group based on the room name, rate name, room rate, and occupancy rate.
Overall, this four-step process provides stability and scalability to effectively manage your room type inventory, so you can handle off-season downtimes and high-season queries like the true hospitality professional you are.
How accurate hotel room type mapping helps drive revenue growth
What was once a complicated topic for revenue managers has since transformed into a key advantage for hoteliers looking to make quick pricing decisions.
Room type mapping is used in a range of Lighthouse product offerings, particularly our Rate Insight tool.
Rate Insight is a rate shopping tool that provides real-time rate intelligence on your competitors’ pricing strategy by uniquely delivering granular insights on competitors’ rates, ranking, reputation and occupancy.
By tracking competitor rates in real-time you can adjust your room pricing and promotions to maximize revenue, based on factors such as customizable room type.
Room type mapping feeds into a rate shopper like Rate Insight by aligning each room category across multiple distribution channels, providing you with an accurate, consistent view of the competitive landscape.
Without room type mapping, similar rooms could appear as entirely different offerings, creating inconsistencies that make rate comparisons challenging.
Rate Insight provides automated, algorithm-supported room type mapping in an easy-to-read dashboard to compare rates. Room types are presented in an intuitive, easy-to-navigate layout that allows for effortless comparison with your compset. See the product view below for an example of this in action.
This clarity helps you to quickly identify pricing opportunities across all room types, ensuring you don’t undercut rates or miss out on high-demand days due to misaligned room pricing.
With this enhanced visibility, you can make more data-driven decisions about pricing and promotions, leading to more effective pricing strategies that optimize room revenue, boost occupancy, and drive overall profitability.
Maximize your hotel’s revenue with Lighthouse
Often hiding in plain sight behind user-friendly interfaces, room type mapping plays a critical role in strategic decision-making for your hotel. However, it is just one component of a comprehensive revenue optimization strategy.
Effective revenue management relies on high-quality data: as the saying goes, good input equals good output. Without accurate, reliable data, even the best revenue management strategies will fall short.
Rate Insight provides unparalleled access to competitor intelligence by aggregating over 2 billion data points daily across 300,000 hotels and 19+ million short-term rentals.
This rich dataset offers real-time insights into competitor rates, rankings, reputation, and occupancy trends – giving you a comprehensive market view to inform your pricing decisions.
By combining high-quality data with intuitive room type mapping and a seamless user experience, Rate Insight empowers you to save time, boost revenue, and make confident, data-driven decisions that drive profitability.
Start a free trial of Rate Insight today, price with confidence and capture more revenue.
About Lighthouse
Lighthouse (formerly OTA Insight) is the leading commercial platform for the travel & hospitality industry. We transform complexity into confidence by providing actionable market insights, business intelligence, and pricing tools that maximize revenue growth. We continually innovate to deliver the best platform for hospitality professionals to price more effectively, measure performance more efficiently, and understand the market in new ways.
Trusted by over 65,000 hotels in 185 countries, Lighthouse is the only solution that provides real-time hotel and short-term rental data in a single platform. We strive to deliver the best possible experience with unmatched customer service. We consider our clients as true partners – their success is our success.
