Undefeated So Far: Pricepoint Dares Hoteliers to Out-Price Its AI in New Game Rate War

Somewhere right now, a hotel is selling its last room for less than it's worth. Somewhere else, a room will sit empty tonight because the rate was $15 too high. Hotel pricing looks simple from the outside. Inside the industry, it's a job that never really stops. Today Pricepoint, the AI revenue management platform for hotels, launched Rate War, a free game that puts anyone in the pricing seat for two minutes and gives them a shot at an AI no one has beaten yet.

Every hotel sets a price for every room type on every night, often a year in advance. Those prices shift with each booking, each competitor move, each concert announcement and each change in the forecast. Get them right and the hotel earns more from the same rooms. Most guests never give it a second thought.

The people who do this work are very good at it. A seasoned revenue manager will spot a citywide convention before rivals react, or hold rate on a busy Tuesday while the hotel across the street panics and discounts. At smaller properties, the same calls fall to a general manager or owner who is also covering the front desk and fixing the ice machine.

The problem is volume. A 20-room hotel with three room types, priced a year out, has nearly 1,100 rates to manage. Get the rate wrong by just $1 a night across those rooms and it adds up to more than $7,000 a year. The market doesn't keep office hours, either. Bookings land at 3 a.m., competitors change rates on Sunday, and one canceled flight can fill a city by morning. Nobody can watch all of that around the clock, least of all a small team that's also checking in guests.

So hotel teams do what any sensible person would. They focus on the next few weeks and the dates that look unusual, and let rules and rate plans handle the rest. That's where hotels lose money: in the decisions nobody had time to make.

How Rate War works

Anyone can play, whether you work the front desk, run the hotel, sell its meeting space or have simply wondered why the same room costs $120 one night and $260 the next. No pricing experience needed. A round takes two minutes, so it fits between the checkout rush and the afternoon check-ins, or in the five-minute gap between meetings when you need to switch off.

1. Check in. Open ratewar.ai in any browser.

2. Read the market. You get 30 nights at a hotel and the demand signals a pricing team would watch.

3. Set your rates. Price every night before the two-minute clock runs out.

4. See where you stand. Compare your result with Pricepoint's AI on the same month, and with everyone else who played it.

5. Come back tomorrow. A new month drops every day.

What Pricepoint says

"Revenue managers are some of the sharpest commercial minds in hospitality, and almost nobody sees what they do," said Mateusz Sznir, CEO and Founder of Pricepoint. "Hand a good one a single night to price and they'll nail it. The hard part is doing that for every night and every room while the market keeps moving at 2 a.m. and on Sunday afternoons. Rate War lets anyone spend two minutes in that seat. We think most people will come out of it with a lot more respect for the job."

Availability

Rate War is free to play now at ratewar.ai. In early testing, nobody has beaten the AI. Think you can be the first? Play, share your score and see if you can beat Pricepoint AI, or at least your colleagues.

Media Contact

Emilia Conroy

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