Where the numbers come from.

RevStar reads each hotel's listing on a public hotel search, the kind that shows what the booking sites and the hotel itself are charging for a night. It keeps one price per hotel per night, read in one of two ways.

From the search results for your area

The price shown beside the hotel for that night.

From the hotel's own listing

For a hotel you compete with, the price on one major booking site when that site is among the sellers listed, and otherwise the lowest price listed. For your own hotel, the price most of the sites listed show, so one site with a wrong price never becomes your rate. RevStar also keeps each site's price for your own hotel, and a site more than 25% away from the price most sites show becomes an item to fix.

Where a listing gives a price before taxes and fees, that is the one used. Where it gives only the price as displayed, RevStar uses that.

Nothing comes from your reservations or from anyone's private system. It is what a guest would see.

On CompRate and Market, a refresh runs every morning from 3 am at your hotel, without anyone logging in. On the trial you press Refresh yourself, once a day, for its 7 days. A refresh usually takes a few minutes.

A paid plan looks ahead 60 nights, every day. The trial covers the 60 nights from the day it starts. Not every night is reread every time: prices far ahead change less often, so they are read less often. A night that shows no price is tried again on every refresh, however far ahead it is.

The dashboard says when rates were last refreshed and what share of the nights have a rate. Detailed history is kept for 60 days.

Every hotel, on every night, is in one of four states, and the screens never blur them:

Available

A price was found for the night.

Sold out

RevStar looked further and found nothing for sale at the hotel for that night.

Minimum stay required

Nothing can be booked for one night, but a longer stay starting that night can.

Not known

No price was found, and looking further did not settle it either way.

A missing price is not proof of a full hotel. The hotel may want a longer stay, may not have loaded its rates that far ahead, or may not sell online at all. So when a hotel shows no price for a night, RevStar looks further before it uses the words sold out, and a missing price on its own is always shown as not known.

That further look is limited on every refresh, so it is not made for every night without a price. A night it did not reach stays not known.

So the mistake RevStar avoids is calling a hotel full when it is not, and the cost is the other one: a hotel that really is full can read as not known. A night that is not known never counts toward a sold out signal.

An AI model searches the web for concerts, games, conferences and the like around your hotel, for the next 90 days. Each event is weighed by how far away it is: in full within 10 miles, less the further out it is, and not at all beyond the radius you set. The radius starts at 40 miles and can be anything from 5 to 100.

Because a model gathers them, the list can miss an event or get a detail wrong. Check the ones that matter to your pricing.

Public holidays are the national ones for your hotel's country. State and local holidays are not marked.

The facts.

For every night: your public rate, the lowest, middle and highest rate among the hotels you compete with, how many of them are sold out, and what is on nearby.

Hotels like yours.

Every hotel is placed in one of six tiers, from economy to luxury, by its brand. Where at least 3 of your competitors are within 1 tier of yours, your rate is compared with those. Otherwise it is compared with all of them, and the page says which. The advice then measures where you usually sit against those hotels, on weekdays and on weekends, and flags the nights that have drifted from it, not the nights you sit under a brand that charges more.

The rules.

Fixed rules mark the nights that look worth your attention: competitors selling out, a big event nearby, a weekend priced under the market, a rate well above or below hotels like yours.

The model.

An AI model is given the same facts and what the rules marked. It writes the final list in plain English: which nights, whether to raise, lower, hold or check, a suggested rate and the reason. It can combine or drop what the rules marked. If the model cannot be reached, the rules' own list is shown.

The checks.

The numbers on each suggestion are then set from the facts, not taken on trust. Your current rate and your competitors' range come from the stored rates. The suggested rate is held inside the range those hotels actually charged on those nights, and a suggested change never goes below your minimum rate if you set one. A change smaller than 5 dollars or 3 percent of your rate, whichever is larger, is not suggested at all.

What is not checked.

The sentence that gives the reason is the model's own. It is not checked word for word against the facts, so read it beside the numbers.

What you see.

Raise, lower, hold or check, with the dates, the suggested rate, the reason, a confidence level, and the range the suggestion was held to.

Only a suggestion to raise carries one. It is the rate difference, times the rooms it counts, times the nights. The rooms it counts are a share of your hotel that depends on the reason for the raise:

That share is the one number nobody can see from outside your hotel, so the app does not hide it. The monthly total says what share it counted, and each raise opens to its full sum under How this is calculated. The morning email gives the figure and calls it an estimate, without the working.

If the share is wrong for you, the figure is wrong by the same amount, and you can redo the sum with your own.

Listings carry mistakes. When one competitor's price for a night is far outside that hotel's own range and no other hotel moved with it, RevStar treats it as an error in the listing and leaves it out of the averages. When the whole market moves together it is left alone: that is the market, and showing it is the point.

If it is your own rate that looks wrong, RevStar shows it as it is and tells you, because that one is yours to fix.

Seen something we got wrong? Write to support@shiningstar.software with the hotel and the night. The common questions cover the rest.