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What Is a BAR Rate?

December 19, 2018| By:Five Star Alliance

As pricing schemes in the tourism and hospitality industries get more and more intricate, businesses are finding new ways of generating profits. One of these is called the BAR rate. We are going to look at what a BAR rate is and how it affects the price of your hotel room.

What Does BAR Stand for?

BAR is an acronym that stands for Best Available Rate. The best available rate is the lowest rate on a given day that guests can book a room for. You don’t need to have any special privileges in order to get access to a BAR rate. They are available to everyone and you don’t make a prepayment, and typically there are no cancellation or change penalties.

What Is the Purpose of a BAR Rate?

The purpose of the BAR rate is to make what hotel guests pay less confusing. There are so many different ways you can pay for a hotel room, and a lot of them have different rates. With the BAR rate you are able to see how much you are paying based on what the rate is for a given day.

How Does the BAR Rate Work?

In a real-life application, this means you could pay a different amount for each day you stay in the hotel. The best available rate is naturally going to fluctuate based on the supply and demand. The supply and demand are affected by how many hotel rooms are available and also how each retail outlet is selling and pricing the rooms. Years ago, rooms were purchased either in person at the hotel or by calling the hotel. Now, it is more common to use a website to book a room. The rate at which rooms sell on each of these websites affects the BAR rate. For instance, if all members of a group of conference attendees all use the same website to book all of their rooms, this could suddenly affect the BAR rate. That could mean that, if you are paying the BAR rate for the duration of your stay, the rate you pay for the day after they book the rooms could be higher. However, this could also work the other way around. If you were to book a room at the BAR rate and do so as a convention was ending, you could end up paying a lower rate because the demand for rooms will likely drop.

How Does the BAR Rate Benefit Consumers?

It can be frustrating to have to pay more than you think you should for a room. It is more frustrating if you do not understand why you have to pay so much. The BAR rate system removes the confusion. This is because the hotel is being transparent about the rate they can charge. Of course, the hotel it is still making a profit, but it is not doing so by artificially inflating the prices of rooms.


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