Ernir Steinn Arnarsson prices ten hotels with around 900 rooms across Iceland, from a 1930 landmark in Reykjavík to a countryside property near Mývatn. Each one has its own guests, its own season and its own strategy.
Ask him what the job is, and he’ll tell you that much of it is asking why. Booking pace softens on a date in March: is that our price, flight capacity, the exchange rate or something in distribution? Quite a lot to think about if you ask us…
High occupancy can look impressive, but if you fill the hotel too cheaply, it’s mainly an expensive way to feel popular.
So the system he prices with has to answer the same question he asks all day. When a price changes, he needs to see why.
It took two other systems to get there. First, a rule-based tool that needed constant maintenance, then a highly automated one that priced in ways the team couldn’t explain. Both moved rates every day, but neither showed its reasoning, so the team was left working out the answer themselves.
It’s a fair question to ask of any system, and a good one answers it in plain language. Here’s what that looks like across ten very different hotels.
When automation adds workload instead of removing it
Iceland is a market where your revenue management skills can quickly improve. You could say it’s like a Master’s exam in your skills. Demand is international and seasonal, and it depends on factors no hotelier controls: airline capacity, exchange rates, weather, volcanic activity, and global mood. A rate you set for good reasons in March can be wrong by April. Normal market conditions rarely stay normal for long.
Keahotels‘ first system was rule-based. The team built pricing rules and then kept rebuilding them. That works in a predictable market. It doesn’t work when demand outpaces your ability to update the logic. As Ernir puts it, a setup that looked perfectly logical on Monday could need intervention by Friday.
So they moved to an AI-driven platform. It ran well operationally, but its prices didn’t consistently match the group’s commercial strategy, and the team couldn’t see how the model weighed one signal against another. Instead of maintaining rules, they were monitoring and correcting outputs.
Ernir’s line on it is the one every revenue manager recognizes: the technology had changed, and the workload had merely changed clothes.
An RMS can automate the clicking and still leave you doing the thinking twice: once to form your own view, and once to work out what the system did and whether to override it. Hours saved on data entry come straight back as hours spent on supervision.
Transparency wasn’t the only requirement. Whatever they chose also had to connect cleanly to the PMS, because a pricing model is only as good as the data connection that carries it.
Why you can’t manage what you can’t see
If you can’t see why a price held flat, you miss the pickup you should have priced into. If you can’t see why a price jumped, you either push rates past what demand supports or you override a decision that was right. Keahotels felt both: reacting too slowly and underpricing, or going beyond what the market could carry. Historical data is useful, but in a volatile market it can’t be the whole answer, and it certainly can’t be the whole answer when you can’t see how it’s weighted.
There’s a second cost, and it’s the one that shows up in your week. When the logic is hidden, you check. You check in the morning, you check before a big arrival date, you check after a competitor drops their rate. That checking is the workload the system was supposed to remove.
Ernir has a test for this that any hotelier can run: how often do I need to log in to correct it? With RoomPriceGenie, his answer is rarely. He’s still the group’s most frequent user, because the platform shows him booking pace, demand shifts and exceptions in a way he can read at a glance. The difference is why he logs in: to decide if the strategy needs to change.
What strategic alignment looks like in a multi-property operation
Keahotels doesn’t run ten identical hotels. Hotel Borg is a 1930 downtown landmark. Sand Hotel is a contemporary boutique on Laugavegur. Hotel Grímsborgir sells privacy, space and nature. Hotel Sigló belongs to the history of Siglufjörður. Strong locations and real Icelandic hospitality are the thread, not a copy-and-paste concept.
A group like that can’t be priced from one set of assumptions. Alignment means the system can hold a different strategy per property while you still manage the portfolio as one job.
In practice, that comes down to three things.
You can see the reasoning. Open any date and you can see what the price is built on: how many rooms have sold for that night, how fast they sold, how far ahead people are booking, and what’s happening around you. The number comes with a reason you can easily understand.
You can change it. Set the lowest and highest rate you’ll accept, per property, so nothing goes outside them. Tell the system how aggressively each hotel should price. Your city-center landmark and your countryside property get different strategies and stay in one place.
You can leave it alone. Once it’s set the way you want, it reprices every room type and every arrival date, every day, across all ten hotels. That’s thousands of decisions a week nobody was ever going to make by hand.
That’s what changed for Keahotels. Instead of entering and checking individual price adjustments across ten hotels and hundreds of arrival dates, the team works on forecasting, market analysis, distribution and long-term strategy. Ernir describes the split cleanly: RoomPriceGenie handles the frequency and volume, and his team provides the direction and judgment.
It also settles the question you, along many other hoteliers, thought about: does an RMS replace the revenue manager? At Keahotels it did the opposite. A revenue manager reads the market, decides where the group should sit against it, chooses which business to take and which to turn down, and explains that plan to an owner. A system can’t do any of that. What it can do is carry the plan out across every date and every room type, faster and more consistently than anyone working by hand. Keahotels kept the judgment and handed over the volume. Their revenue function moved up a level, and in Ernir’s words it freed the revenue manager to spend more time doing actual revenue management.
What changed at Keahotels
Keahotels gained ground on its market. That’s the headline for Ernir, and in a market as unpredictable as Iceland it’s the number that means the most. Against the same period last year:
- Nominal ADR up 17.46%
- Occupancy broadly flat, with market share strengthening
- Total revenue up around 2%
Occupancy in Iceland is driven by flight capacity and overall market demand, so holding a position against the market says more about performance than a full hotel does. RoomPriceGenie lets the group respond to the demand efficiently, with less manual work and more confidence in the pricing.
The return that they noticed first was on the operational level. Less time adjusting rates by hand, more time on strategy and analysis.
The evaluation started with a recommendation. GODO, one of Iceland’s leading hospitality software providers, told Keahotels that RoomPriceGenie was the best two-way RMS integration they had worked with. Even an excellent pricing model loses its value if the connection to the PMS brings delays or manual work with it.
Our research with RMS says the same thing at scale. The Hospitality Engineer Report 2026, found that 42% of operators spend one to three hours a week fixing system and data issues, and another 20% spend four hours or more. The number of systems turned out not to be the problem. Even properties running one to three tools reported wrong rates, missing data and failed syncs. It’s the quality of the connections between systems that decides how much time you lose, which is exactly what GODO was pointing at.
What this means for your group
You don’t need ten hotels in Iceland to use what Ernir learned, but a portfolio does raise the stakes. One property you can keep an eye on yourself. Five or fifteen it’s getting harder, so every hotel you add makes you more dependent on being able to see why a price is what it is. That’s the real test for a group: can each property keep its own strategy, and can you still see the reasoning behind any price in the portfolio without opening fifteen dashboards to find it?
That’s what RoomPriceGenie gives multiproperty businesses. One view of the whole portfolio, each hotel on its own strategy and its own rate boundaries, and the reasoning behind prices, whenever you want to look at them. Ernir still logs in most days. He goes in to read booking pace and decide whether the strategy needs to change, which is a different job from checking that the prices came out right.
Want to see how it works for your group? Talk with our Genies.
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