Modern hospitality professionals have more revenue data to assess and decisions to make than ever. And that’s not likely to change.
What you can change is your approach to analyzing data and making decisions.
Luckily, there’s an easier, more efficient way to do that. It begins with automation.
Before you think to yourself, “Will automating my hospitality revenue management system put me out of a job,” take a deep breath and relax.
Automated revenue management systems (RMS) for the hospitality industry aren’t here to replace smart humans like you. These solutions are here to help you and your team increase efficiency, save time, and excel in your roles.
How can an RMS help your hospitality organization increase efficiency, save time, and boost revenue?
A quality revenue management system for hospitality organizations like hotels, casinos, resorts, and outdoor recreation areas help commercial teams process data, generate actionable insights, and adapt quickly to competitive intelligence. These RMS solutions boost operational efficiencies, manage available inventory, and support central revenue management operations from single locations to entire estates.
And revenue managers aren’t the only professionals in an organization that benefit from an RMS.
As hospitality organizations restructure around forward-looking commercial strategies, owners, general managers, sales teams, events teams, and executives all stand to benefit from using (or working with someone who uses) an RMS.
And a sophisticated revenue management solution isn’t just for enterprise chains but rather hospitality businesses of all types and sizes. That includes everything from boutique hotels to all-inclusive resorts and casinos to campgrounds.
So, what are some of the functions in a hospitality revenue management system that can help you and your team increase efficiency, streamline operations, and exceed your goals?
Feature #1: Versatile pricing
Benefit: Automatically find the most profitable price point even as conditions shift.
Whether demand is high or low, business has shifted to different segments or guest booking trends have changed. An automated RMS enables hotels to price all their business competitively and confidently under any circumstance. While RevPAR indices and ADR are on the path to recovery in many markets, the best opportunity to generate revenue efficiently is to ensure you capture the right business at the right price. Capitalizing as demand recovers requires an advanced RMS with versatile pricing that can:
- Dynamically price key products like advance purchase or loyalty discounted rate plans
- Independently price by room type, segment or channel
- Optimally set price by length of stay
- Factor in demand, guest willingness to pay, room-type hierarchy and the true influence of competitors
These capabilities combined with automatically managing rate availability, upgrades and room overbooking will ensure your property balances accepting the most valuable business with maximizing revenue from available inventory.
Feature #2: Proactive forecasting
Benefit: Predict future changes so that you can react quicker and more decisively.
Powerful and proactive analytics provide the compass needed to navigate market changes and demand shifts. The predictive analytics of a leading RMS factor in many data sources, and yes, historical data is a small piece of the optimization cycle and still relevant for understanding pricing patterns, demand patterns, length of stay, and booking behavior.
More importantly, advanced analytics evaluate future on-the-books and pace, price sensitivity, market data, unconstrained demand, and even prices by room type and/or market segment, ensuring you drive the most profitable business to your property to help you recover faster.
Feature #3: Manage by exception
Benefit: Get your day back and focus more on strategy by reducing tedious, repetitive work.
No more manual rate updates in selling systems. No more time-consuming evaluations of competitor data and setting inventory and rate controls. No more spreadsheets. Basic tactical activities are automated, and through alerts or notifications you are made aware when there are significant changes or situations that require your intervention.
Use free time to create revenue strategies and make decisions that drive revenue in the long term. You’ve learned to do more with less, so it’s important to ensure the team has the right tools and intelligent automation needed to efficiently manage your revenue strategy while enabling time to support other areas of your business.
Feature #4: Maximize groups
Benefit: Empower sales teams with analytics that help them maximize profits from group business events
The group pricing and evaluation capabilities of an advanced RMS go well beyond a simple displacement analysis, and they give sales managers the insights needed to capture the most profitable group business. We are entering a unique time for group business, in some regions small in-person events are returning while the hybrid virtual/in-person format will continue to evolve and grow in sophistication. It’s more important than ever to ensure you take the right pieces of business at the right time.
As with any business or revenue plan for a company, successful adaptability is not determined by knowing what specific outcome will occur but by understanding all possible outcomes and then assembling an agile strategy to achieve optimal performance each step of the way.
Find a hospitality revenue management system that works best for you and your organization
Today’s hospitality tech stack must be as seamless and integrated as the guest experience it supports. It should balance user ease and efficiency with data-driven profitability and decision empowerment.
With a cutting-edge RMS at the core of the connected technology ecosystem, hospitality organizations will be enabled to think outside the guest room toward total profit optimization of all revenue streams.
Understand the benefits and features of a hospitality revenue managment system on a deeper level by downloading the Hospitality Revenue Management Ultimate Buyer’s Guide.
