Multi-Scenario Pricing for Hotel Revenue Management

Dynamic pricing algorithms have been widely studied to manage hotel and platform revenue over online travel platforms (OTPs). For better dynamic pricing, the accurate estimation of the market demand and the market competitiveness are crucial. However, the existing approaches obtain a pricing strategy tailored to each specific scenario using data only from that scenario. They are not considering the shared information between different scenarios, i.e., the data from different scenarios are not fully utilized. So we propose a Multi Scenario Pricing model (MSP) with a novel sharing structure design that leverages cross-scenario and specific information to capture more accurate market demand and competitiveness. Specifically, the model structure explicitly separates information into shared components as market demand and specific information as scenario-wise price competitiveness to prevent domain seesaw. To capture the inherent correlation between listings in different scenarios, an attention network named Price Competitiveness Representation Extraction (PCRE) is well-designed. Meanwhile, traditional metrics are skewed towards model that tends to reduce the price regardless of sample distribution. Thus we propose new offline evaluation metrics that shift attention with sample distribution to avoid biased pricing strategies, which is proved to be more closely related to actual business revenue. Our proposed MSP shows superiority under both offline and online experiments on real-world datasets. The multi-scenario industry dataset and our code are available. To the best of our knowledge, it will be the first real-industry multi-scenario pricing data.