Consulting Services answers recent client questions about hotel revenue management
Neil Corr, IDeaS senior advisor, discusses what the industry is talking about in 2018.
Since IDeaS’ early beginnings in 1989, our timeline of product and service evolution is a great barometer of the fast-paced changes in hospitality revenue management over the decades. And now, we’re seeing expansion into other industries, such as parking and function/meeting space, and providers are keen to leverage the power of automated revenue optimization.
The revolution in pricing methodologies have enabled greater pricing agility and sophistication since the days of dynamic pricing. Folding in future looking demand data sources, i.e. TravelClick Demand360, along with the influence of consumer travel intelligence, i.e. nSight for IDeaS, demonstrates how far we have come from the days of BAR pricing and group displacement.
We have seen common themes in both industry and academia with studies from respected institutions, such as HSMAI and Cornell, keen to highlight core areas of focus for revenue leaders. The move towards what we refer to as “next generation integration” turns the focus on what should go into the optimization cycle: critical and relevant data vs. “noisy” data such as weather, flight, regrets, denials, web analytics and so on.
Indeed, there are still many inconsistencies and variations within the hospitality industry today with the use of reputation, competitor and benchmark data. As I work with enterprise hotel groups in the EMEA region, I am frequently asked, “what is the industry talking about in 2018?” We find the common denominators below:
Working with an intuitive tool like IDeaS G3 Revenue Management System (IDeaS G3 RMS), enables revenue leaders to create better informed campaigns and tactical promotions, better influence e-commerce strategies and use enhanced “what-if” functionality which leverages powerful predictive analytics to drive incremental revenues.
With the move towards total profit optimization and enhanced asset performance, it is important to focus not only on profit-driven group evaluations, ensuring margins are protected, but to additionally focus on revenue optimization in other segments such as food and beverage, spa and function space.
We continue to see vast business process improvements as revenue leaders discover the agile capabilities within IDeaS’ G3 RMS. Advanced features, such as business insights reporting and channel source performance measurement, have enabled the tracking of acquisition costs, booking origins and profit driven KPIs—like net RevPAR and GOPPAR—to set revenue leaders up for total revenue success.
Pricing approaches are becoming more sophisticated to tackle a more fluid, personalized consumer journey . Before being able to fully exploit IDeaS’ multiple pricing approaches, e.g. by day, length of stay, or continuous, it is critical to perform an analytical segmentation of business with finite attribution to drive optimal forecast performance.
We spend a lot of time working with our clients to achieve improvements in forecasting by helping build a framework around thousands of individual transactions, attributed by behavior. This framework provides greater granularity, enhanced forecast performance and thus more pricing/rate opportunities.
In today’s increasingly competitive environment, revenue leaders achieving integrated pricing and inventory control optimization, by accommodation class, are yielding optimal returns from their technology. These successful leaders are using technology that analytically incorporates competitor data by room type, including online reputation sentiment, with influence from the most relevant market intelligence data available.
Of course, a key goal for any revenue leader with aspirations to innovate, is to become increasingly more strategic than tactical. This in turn, frees up bandwidth to move from sifting through cumbersome reports to dynamic alerts using tools, such as “Information Manager”, to foster a “manage by exception” environment.
As we look to the future and prosperous start to 2018, we anticipate (or better still, accurately forecast!) further milestones on that timeline—plotting developments with market data, channel performance capabilities and of course, the ultimate goal of price and profit optimization!
Hey, don’t leave now—the fun is just beginning. Here are more industry insights making the rounds this week:
- Guest-Centrism: Motivating the New Era in CRS: As many of us in the hospitality industry have done, it is common at one time you may have debated the value of CRS vs. channel managers. SHR has written a blog to dive deeper into what motivates us today in the distribution arena.
- Is Cash Dead in the Hospitality Sector: Cash brings a number of challenges to food service outlets; the cost of cashing up and banking every day, the lack of personalization options (as cash is anonymous), hygiene and theft. Oracle Hospitality speaks to the trend of a cashless environment in this blog. Will this catch on?
- Six Key Digital Marketing Trends to Watch for in 2018: When it comes to a new year, guides to having the most profitable year for your property become very handy. Our friends at Bookassist have put together a list of digital you are already doing and discovering the wave of new opportunities being created in 2018.
- Guest Complaints Need Not Be the Thing of Nightmares: That moment you see the dreaded angry guest complaint that had found its way to your desk. Check out, ReviewPro‘s blog that will turn those dreaded moments into useful insight, or a helpful nudge in the right direction.
- Total Revenue Forecasting Is Coming…Rome - July 13, 2021
- Can Hotel Revenue Management Ever Satisfy a Finance Leader’s Forecast & Budget Demands? - September 16, 2020
- Bed & Brexit – Can Futurecasting Help Hoteliers Accommodate the UK’s Bumpy Departure? - December 5, 2018
