Trastevere Suites cuts 4 hours per day of manual channel management
The property
Trastevere Suites is a 42-room independent property in the cobbled streets of the Trastevere neighbourhood in Rome, on Via della Lungaretta near Piazza San Cosimato. The property runs seven room categories from a compact Classic Double up to a two-bedroom Family Suite overlooking the courtyard. Annual room revenue in 2024 was approximately €1.2 million, with an occupancy of 78% and an ADR of €126.
The team is small: general manager Giulia Ferrari, a front-office manager, two receptionists on rotating shifts, four housekeepers and a maintenance person. Distribution runs through Wubook ZAK, which the property adopted in 2019 after outgrowing a spreadsheet-based approach. Channels connected: Booking.com (55% of bookings), Expedia (18%), the direct website via Wubook Bookizer (17%), and a handful of smaller OTAs.
The problem
Every morning at 08:00, the front-office manager would open Wubook, check the 60-day forward view, compare against Booking.com for the top three competitor properties (also in Trastevere), and adjust rates by hand for any date where either occupancy pace or competitor pricing had moved materially. On a busy day this took 90 minutes; on rebooking Mondays after a Champions League match at the Stadio Olimpico, closer to three hours. Total time sink: 4 to 5 hours per day across the front-office team.
Beyond the time, the manual approach missed short-window opportunities. When a competitor closed a rate suddenly (as happened during the Papal Jubilee dates in April 2025), Trastevere Suites often noticed 24 hours later, by which point half the pickup had already gone elsewhere at a lower rate.
What they activated
Channel Autopricer for Wubook ZAK, €26 per month. Activated on 14 October 2024 via the standard Wubook Login flow. Setup took about 25 minutes: Giulia walked through the min/max bounds per room type (Classic Double: €89 floor, €245 ceiling; Suite: €180 floor, €520 ceiling) and picked the three competitor properties to track.
The first 14 days ran in shadow mode — the module produced a nightly recommendation but did not push to Wubook. Giulia reviewed each morning and approved the changes manually. On 29 October the switch was flipped to live and the module started pushing recalculated BARs at 02:00 CET every night.
The numbers after 90 days
Time saved: 4.2 hours per day across the front-office team, measured by comparing the November-January time-tracking to the same window a year earlier.
Revenue impact: ADR increased 6.4% year-over-year to €134, occupancy held at 77% (down 1 percentage point). Total room revenue up 5.1%. Giulia attributes about half of the ADR lift to Autopricer catching short-window compression events; the rest to a broader market recovery.
Disruption: none. The Wubook rate plan structure was not modified, corporate rates negotiated with two nearby companies were left alone (Autopricer only touches the public BAR), and when the property manually overrides a night (for a specific Champions League surge), Autopricer respects the manual value for 48 hours before resuming automation.
Quote from the general manager
"For €26 a month we got our mornings back. Wubook stays the source of truth — Autopricer just does the tedious part faster than we could."
— Giulia Ferrari, GM, Trastevere Suites Rome