Greene King Drives Greater Profitability & Efficiency Across Its Growing Hospitality Empire

The Story

Greene King, founded in 1799 by 19-year-old Benjamin Greene, is the UK’s largest pub retailer and brewer. Based in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England, the hospitality company also owns and operates over 100 hotels—along with its 2,500+ pubs and restaurants—in towns, villages, and city centres across England, Wales, and Scotland.

And out of its main offices, a small but mighty sales & revenue team handles pricing and distribution for all of Greene King’s hotel properties, which vary widely in size—from six to 74 guest rooms—business mix, market, and style. To make this possible, revenue manager Chris O’Neill and his team have been happily using IDeaS Revenue Management System (RMS) on a daily basis since 2016 to keep their resources optimised and revenue maximised across the Greene King estate.

But it wasn’t always automated revenue management bliss across the Kingdom…

An Unsustainable Manual Process

In the days before IDeaS, O’Neill was charged with manually overseeing pricing and distribution for Greene King’s then nearly 50 hotels—and that property count was growing fast.

“For a small team overseeing so many properties, it had become nearly impossible to implement even the most basic demand-based pricing strategies across that number of bedrooms,” said O’Neill.

As Greene King continued to grow, it quickly became apparent superb human abilities alone would not be enough to ensure a scalable revenue management strategy for Greene King’s future success. The company selected leading RMS provider IDeaS to deliver automated, science-based decision-making to its existing portfolio and help ensure faster uptime in the process of bringing new properties on board.

“The implementation of IDeaS RMS across existing and newly acquired properties has always been a smooth, well-structured process,” said O’Neill. “The IDeaS team has been great to work with, always meeting milestones and staying on schedule. Our Client Relationship Manager offers us proactive support during our regular check-ins and is always helping us identify new opportunities and discover better ways to utilise the system.”

An Automated Solution for the Entire Organisation

Since implementing IDeaS RMS, the entire Greene King hotel organisation has reaped the rewards, beyond just the immediate benefits enjoyed by its direct users. The efficiency provided by the automated solution not only frees up Greene King’s centrally located revenue team to focus more on forward-looking strategy, but it also helps ensure on-property staff have more time to focus on their guests’ satisfaction.

“Having a system like IDeaS helps align Greene King’s revenue strategy,” said O’Neill. “We use it to share daily reports with area managers and general managers across the estate, and the ‘At-a-Glance’ screen is very user friendly so all can easily and quickly make sense of the insights and then get back to doing what matters most.”

Greene King’s sales & revenue team trusts IDeaS RMS to automate daily tasks, enabling them to:

• Simplify the complexity of dynamic length-of-stay pricing across 100+ hotels
• Better manage best available rates, flexing them up and down in line with demand
• Confidently create compelling promotional campaigns without putting higher-rated business at risk
• Forecast and report with greater accuracy and demand-based data insights

“I would absolutely recommend IDeaS to any hotel group in the market for an RMS,” said O’Neill. “IDeaS has made a significant difference in our day-to-day. The system handles a lot of the groundwork for us, giving us more time and flexibility.”

Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2021, Greene King was eager to recover quickly and return to previous levels of high demand. O’Neill appreciated all IDeaS had done to support the hotel group during the downturn and was thankful they had the system in place and ready to go as conditions improved.

IDeaS RMS has helped us feel confident in our reopening efforts as we move out of the worst period of the pandemic and onto what we hope to be a fast recovery.