Barrington Riverside Cottages sits where the Barrington River curls through the foothills of Barrington Tops in New South Wales, Australia. Encompassing five self-contained cottages scattered across a working farm, guests can feed alpacas and collect fresh eggs by day before falling asleep to the sound of the river at night.
The accommodations include Melani Lodge, an adults-only luxury retreat; the four-bedroom Tori Farmhouse; and Tilly, Grace and the wheelchair-accessible Mardi cottages, each styled with the kind of country charm that makes the property a regular pick for family reunions, milestone birthdays and couples chasing quiet luxury. There’s also a private freshwater swimming hole, a fire pit and views that end up on Instagram before bags are even unpacked.
Barrington Riverside Cottages is owned by a small group of friends, with Shuyi Wu looking after distribution and revenue for the property.
Updating rates sporadically was limiting performance potential
With no established background in hotel revenue management, Shuyi was relying on instinct rather than data to get pricing right; an approach that doesn’t maximise results in a market that changes constantly.
“We’re not professional property managers,” Shuyi explains. “Once a year we’d meet up to look at the market and decide if we want to keep the price the same or increase it a little, and fix it for the whole year or at least half of it.”
Beyond that annual cadence, the group still had to remember, months in advance, to manually lift rates for Christmas and school holidays. This relied too much on guesswork, and not enough on analysing actual demand fluctuations.
Dynamic Revenue Plus introduced a strategic approach, with no extra effort
When a colleague flagged a meeting about a new SiteMinder feature, Dynamic Revenue Plus, Shuyi wasn’t sure what to expect.
“Someone introduced this new feature to me, and I thought, why not?” She recalls. “I honestly didn’t expect it to bring that big of an increase. But it was new so I thought I’d try it.”
Dynamic Revenue Plus is SiteMinder’s integrated revenue intelligence solution powered by SiteMinder iQ, a unique proprietary artificial intelligence built on 300million+ room nights booked annually. It tracks the market and identifies demand opportunities in real-time. This includes defining a property’s competitive set, measuring property performance in key metrics such as pace and ADR, and delivering high-impact comparison insights that can be easily transformed into tangible revenue strategies. Booking and demand signals, pricing recommendations powered by IDeaS, competition and destination insights, and tailored revenue guidance from SiteMinder’s team combine to give all hoteliers the ability to better manage revenue, regardless of prior experience.
For a property that was previously priced once a year over a catch-up, it was a whole new way of operating.
Revenue growth of over 22% and valuable time savings
When Dynamic Revenue Plus went live, Shuyi’s role didn’t have to change – but the business certainly did. By enabling the automation feature, Shuyi allowed SiteMinder to manage the property’s rates in real-time.
“I just set it up once and let it run itself,” she says. “I just watched the bookings and revenue increase. I’m happy, so I leave it alone.”
Once a month had passed, the numbers started to show the shift that was happening, and Shuyi became more content to quickly check the dashboard and trust the system, satisfied that everything was tracking well.
In the first seven months after implementation, Barrington Riverside Cottages has seen:
- Revenue up 22.4%, driven almost entirely by smarter pricing rather than more bookings.
- Average daily rate up 20.9%, as rates moved with demand instead of sitting fixed for months at a time.
- Room nights sold up 1.2%, confirming the revenue lift came from optimised pricing, rather than from chasing extra occupancy.
In addition to the revenue growth, Shuyi and the team became more efficient. Instead of manually adjusting rates for peak seasons well in advance, they could now rely on SiteMinder to handle the complexity with much more accuracy.
“Normally we’d have to adjust the price for Christmas and school holidays in advance, but this year I left it to the system,” she says. “It saved me a lot of time.”
Together, these gains have given the ownership group a more predictable, more profitable business, without asking them to become industry experts.
“I think it’s a really smart product,” Shuyi says. “Even with very limited knowledge of marketing or pricing, it helped me increase my revenue, and it’s easy to use. I think it’s especially useful for a small property like ours, when we don’t have a lot of time to spend on marketing, or on comparing prices in the market and setting them ourselves. That’s really helpful.”
Success enabled by superior support
The results seen by Barrington Riverside Cottages were complemented by the professional guidance SiteMinder’s team offered to Shuyi through the process.
SiteMinder customers using Dynamic Revenue Plus gain access to revenue management experts, who help ensure revenue success with the feature. Shuyi’s point of contact walked her through the set-up in detail before handing over the keys.
“He actually guided me through set-up, step by step, and made sure everything worked,” she explains. “After that, I didn’t need to touch it again, and it works perfectly. That tells me he knows the system so well, and he knows my property well too, so he can help me get a better result.”
“He helped me understand it and made sure I could see the benefit, which makes me happy to pay for this feature in the future,” she admits.
Thank you, Shuyi, for the wonderful feedback. It’s a pleasure for SiteMinder to support Barrington Riverside Cottages’ continued growth.