SAS® Advanced Analytics Go Beyond the Others

SAS, the world’s leading analytics company, solves business challenges that others ignore with unparalleled experience and depth across multiple major industries. For hospitality, IDeaS solutions benefit from hundreds of proven SAS advanced analytic models, always ready to solve specific business challenges facing hotels today. Beneath the sleek user interface, the analytics, along with machine learning, are working on your behalf, 24/7, while you enjoy the results.

IDeaS revenue management solutions analytically assess guest price sensitivity while accounting for season, day-of-week, days-to-arrival, length of stay, and more, in addition to managing rate availability, optimizing stay patterns and strategic overbooking to drive the most revenue overall.

Harnessing this power, IDeaS’ solutions organize your data in a way that’s best for optimization, and this is where ordinary revenue management systems can run into issues. This is because oftentimes the best way to organize your data for optimization is not the best way to report on it from a business perspective.

As an example, most revenue management systems would combine and forecast certain corporate business into one group, for ease of reporting on that market segment. IDeaS’ revenue management solutions use a sophisticated analytical segmentation process to break-down the traditional PMS business coding (e.g. market codes) and organize the data based on different behavioral elements. This unique separation is how we optimize the business differently to drive better revenue performance. This approach analytically separates corporate business that can be priced and yielded (e.g. discounted, non-last room available (LRA) corporate rates) from fixed priced business that can only be managed by availability (e.g. fixed price, non-LRA corporate rates.) Separating out these rates supports more robust forecasting and more importantly: the best basis for business optimization.

The analytics engine found in IDeaS’ solutions separates your data to best optimize for transient business – considering both pricing and rate availability decisions – while still allowing you to granularly report the way you want.

Be More Strategic in Less Time

The IDeaS “manage by exception” philosophy allows basic tactical activities to be automated, with users made aware immediately of significant changes or conditions that require their expertise. This approach prioritizes critical actions and monitoring, freeing up more time to spend on strategic activities.

Users can easily review and monitor all changes the system makes, including –changes that may require action or have the most revenue impact. Decision-based IDeaS solutions intuitively guide users to the tasks they should perform, without having to review system changes via multiple reports or long lists of alerts from recommendation-based systems.

IDeaS solutions also support exception-based reporting customizable by job role. These can include summary overviews for owners, executives and general managers, along with deeper dives for revenue managers and data analysts. Informative dashboards also help a variety of hotel team members gain actionable insights relevant to their business needs.

Guided workflows and just-in-time learning are so intuitive that even users who access IDeaS on a limited basis will be able to perform necessary tasks with ease.

Powerful Controls

Price alone cannot manage your peak night occupancy while also increasing shoulder night performance, because it’s only one part of the picture. Instead, hotels need to optimize both price and inventory together to capture the most profitable mix of demand and optimize length-of-stay patterns.

Unlike ordinary revenue management systems that focus on managing publicly available rates, IDeaS understands that these rates are just one of many business types your revenue strategy must take into account. All of this business impacts one another: publicly available rates, groups, corporate, wholesale, air crews, loyalty, promotions, packages, meetings and events, etc. Pricing only the publicly available rates—without considering the relationships between segments and what rates should be available when—will not deliver ideal revenue performance. Understanding these impacts leads to better pricing and inventory control decisions that maximize revenue performance.

Research has shown that hotels that optimize both pricing and availability will outperform hotels that restrict themselves to managing pricing alone. The IDeaS approach employs powerful user controls that align yielding with business needs to maximize overall revenue.

Last Room Value – Accept the most valuable business across all guest stay patterns

Overbooking – Avoid lost revenues due to cancellations and no-shows

Pricing – Apply the most advanced and flexible pricing toward your transient, group and meetings and events business

Decision Systems

All hotels face the common challenges of how to:

• Forecast occupancy
• Set associated pricing strategies
• Determine overbooking levels
• Distribute pricing across various channels
• Report on the results

Regardless of these challenges, hotel businesses should not have to sacrifice time reviewing and implementing system recommendations rather than executing a revenue strategy.

Underneath the surface and behind its sleek user interface, IDeaS cloud-based solutions continually produce powerful decisions that enable hotels to achieve optimal revenue performance through automated controls that manage pricing, rate availability and overbooking. These decisions are based on a sophisticated analytical understanding of how a hotel’s business behaves.

Automated decisions do not mean you simply “set it and forget it.” Users still directly interact with system inputs, sharing business insights such as sudden changes in the marketplace. The goal is to ensure the solution uses the best information available to produce the most beneficial mix of automated decisions that drive profitable business performance. These time-sensitive controls are distributed to your booking channels in a prompt and routine manner. The system also automatically learns from the impacts of these decisions in the market, enabling it to continually adapt, improve and produce highly accurate forecasts.

Ideal Pricing & Evaluation for Group Business

As the most robust group pricing tool in the industry, IDeaS Group Pricing functionality provides the exclusive ability to not only provide immediate pricing results for group business inquiries, but also forecast group materialization and group wash by market segment and room type. An evaluation tool determines a group’s entire value and the value of any potential business being displaced, allowing users to develop comprehensive evaluations of group opportunities and model various scenarios to identify which group inquiry will return the greatest profit to the hotel.

• Deliver immediate and accurate pricing recommendations to prospective groups and key stakeholders
• Factor all group-related costs and associated revenue into your decisions to determine true profitability, including concessions, comps and commissions, banquet, audio/visual and ancillary spend
• Offer alternative date recommendations for groups that have flexibility, allowing you to choose dates hat generate the highest profitability for your hotel
• Perform evaluations at the room type or hotel level to support specific group requirements and maximize inventory
• Evaluate group requests across multiple properties, so that you can place business at any location that will maximize enterprise profitability
• Configure group rates by date range, season, group size, market segment and arrival date to support hotel-specific revenue strategies