Every August 8th at IDeaS, we like to celebrate a day that’s near and dear to our founders’ hearts: Revenue Science Day.
From an outsider’s perspective, it might just seem like a somewhat-flimsy reason to have a little fun as an organization—after all, this celebration also doubles as the shared birthday of our founders Dr. Ravi Mehrotra and Sanjay Nagalia.
(Note, the improbability of a shared birthday among founders of a company that deals in probabilities isn’t lost on us—who says the universe doesn’t have a sense of humor?)
But don’t let the light frivolity of a Capital Letter Officially Named Day fool you: our organization’s passion for applying a rigorous, mathematical approach to solving hospitality revenue management challenges is palpable.
Over the decades, we’ve seen the practice of hospitality revenue management decision-making at evolve from relatively crude spreadsheets and partially informed manual guesswork being the standard to today where a highly refined, algorithmically guided approach is the gold standard for revenue success.
That growth doesn’t happen without years upon years of building hard-earned trust.
“What feels obvious today was far from obvious then. Many organizations were understandably skeptical about whether algorithms could assist with decisions that had traditionally relied on experience and intuition,” says Dr. Mehrotra. “In many ways, the early years at IDeaS were less about technology and more about building trust.”
“In many ways, the early days at IDeaS were less about technology and more about building trust.”
Sleepless nights and getting it right
For relatively recent additions to the IDeaS team, it’s easy to take for granted that our clients expect an RMS to perform as intended.
That’s a luxury that first grew from a seed of belief, and it has been long nourished by clients who were willing to collaborate, experiment, and challenge assumptions. Over the years, this has shaped entirely new ways of operating, and many now common concepts and practices in hospitality revenue management were first refined through years of partnership with forward-thinking hotel operations.
“Seeing thousands of talented professionals around the world building careers in this discipline is something neither of us could have fully imagined in the early days.”
While our co-founders’ early belief in technology and mathematics’ combined ability to improve revenue decisions was firm, the weight of their work—and the trust placed with IDeaS to get it right—was, and remains, immense. After all, the viability of a hotel business and the livelihood of its employees hinges on revenue performance.
For Sanjay Nagalia, co-founder, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operating Officer of IDeaS, the weight of getting it right in the early days of IDeaS was consuming. As he recalled at the 2026 Converge Client Summit, our first hotel client truly had to take a leap of faith. At the time, all pricing outputs were sent straight to market and there was not yet a user interface for easy oversight. As you might expect, many, many, many check-in calls were personally made to ensure everything was not only working properly from a technical standpoint, but also for driving results.
“I would find myself in bed at night, lying awake with worry wondering if the pricing decisions we were sending out were working as intended,” Nagalia shared. “It’s one thing to feel confident about the decisions on paper and in the performance we were seeing from tens of thousands of test simulations, but a lot can go wrong in the real world. Fortunately for all of us here, at about 3 months in that first client property reported over a million dollars in revenue uplift compared to the previous year.”
While confidence in IDeaS’ capabilities has continued to grow over the years, that investment in the wellbeing of our clients has not diminished. We believe every hotel, from flagship properties for globally known brands to small, family-run boutiques deserves to have a dependable, trusted and proven revenue management technology partner.
Walking the walk
Of course, it takes more than brilliant founding leadership to build a dependable engine for complex revenue management and commercial strategy decisions. IDeaS currently employs 24 PhDs focused on revenue management, AI development, machine learning models, and better-automation algorithms. That’s a massive investment in research and development, and we’re committed to ensuring we have the right resources in place to tackle some of the biggest revenue optimization challenges facing hospitality and beyond.
“When Sanjay and I started, the challenge wasn’t really about building software—plenty of software companies existed,” Dr. Mehrotra said. “The challenge was understanding how demand behaves, how customers make choices, how uncertainty can be measured, and how mathematics can improve decisions about price and inventory.”
That singular focus on applying mathematics and technology to help navigate the practical realities of hospitality revenue management is a big reason why revenue managers representing 34,000+ properties in 164 countries can rest easy at night.
“Revenue management has evolved from a niche specialty into one of the most strategically important functions in hospitality,” says Nagalia. “Seeing thousands of talented professionals around the world building careers in this discipline is something neither of us could have fully imagined in the early days.”
From Revenue Science to Decision Science
With any birthday celebration comes a desire to look ahead and ask what’s next. As technical computing limitations have eased over the decades, the scope and complexity of decisions we’re tackling has steadily grown. While new hospitality commercial strategy frontiers like marketing, event space, and profit optimization bring new challenges and trade-offs for our decision engine to weigh—the mindset and mission of IDeaS remains steady.
“The real mission was always, ‘How do we help people make better decisions in environments of uncertainty?’” says Dr. Mehrotra. “That is fundamentally a decision science problem.”
This Revenue Science Day, we’re as excited as ever about the potential we can unlock together with our clients. With a scientific approach informed by the wealth of hospitality business expertise of our clients, we believe we’re just getting started.
“We could not have done this without our clients,” emphasized Dr. Mehrotra. “Starting out, we were scientists who knew how to solve problems but didn’t necessarily understand the hospitality business. Our clients are the ones who taught us their business, what they’re looking for and how to think about it. They are truly part of the team—and we are all better because of this.”
Interested in continuing to shape the future of hospitality revenue management with us? See why 34,000+ properties worldwide trust IDeaS.