Growing Revenue in a Weaker Market: Hamilton Island Achieves 6.7% Revenue Gain

The Story

Hamilton Island is a multi-property island resort destination, with 645 rooms across six separate properties. Located in the heart of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, nestled amongst Queensland’s Whitsunday Islands, Hamilton Island is predominantly a leisure destination, also popular for conferences and weddings. Hamilton Island offers a wide range of accommodation for its international and Australian visitors, catering to any need or budget, from its island-style Palm Bungalows to the world-class luxury resort, quaila.

A need for speed & efficiency

The tourism landscape in Australia has undergone a period of softer demand over recent years, with a high local currency and global economic troubles combining to impact visitor numbers. It was reported that in 2011 international visitor numbers were down nine percent, whilst the number of Australians taking foreign holidays was up 10 percent—which has put pressure on local tour operators, hotels and resorts to ensure they have the right systems and offerings for their market in place.

In Hamilton Island’s case, this led to reviewing existing hotel operations and systems to ensure they were up to date. Through the review it became apparent Hamilton Island faced specific revenue management challenges. Due to the existing manual systems in place, it was difficult to efficiently collect data, analyse it and use it to produce accurate and effective forecasts and reports.

“Too much staff time was being utilised to collect data and manually input it into spreadsheets, which was leaving a shortage of time to actually analyse it. Manual entry was also increasing the risk of human error. We realised we needed a faster, more effective way to forecast down to a daily level for all of Hamilton Island’s properties, including forecasting wash, in particular for trade allotments,” said Hamilton Island Revenue Manager, Emma Perham.

The manual system was not only making reporting time-consuming for staff, but its scope was also limited.

“We wanted to widen the scope of our reports to include booking pace and performance comparison, as well as forecast down to a more granular level—including by day and market segment. A more scientific approach was also needed to evaluate the true impact of conferences and group bookings on the business. We realised we needed to employ an intelligent revenue management system with advanced analytics to improve on our existing revenue management practices,” Perham said.

Streamlined forecasting & reporting

After an industry recommendation, Hamilton Island turned to IDeaS Revenue Management System (RMS) to more effectively collect and analyse its data, and to create meaningful forecasts, pricing decisions and reporting.

“Employing IDeaS RMS has enabled us to streamline the forecasting process, allowing more time to be spent analysing data rather than manually manipulating spreadsheets. We have improved our forecast performance and now we are better equipped to monitor shifts in demand, wash of trade allotments and booking pace for special events,” Perham said.

We realised we needed to employ an intelligent revenue management system with advanced analytics to improve on our existing revenue management practices.

Increased revenue & time efficiency

Since implementing IDeaS, Hamilton Island has experienced efficiency benefits across their properties. This has been achieved by minimising manual data entry tasks by revenue managers and automating revenue management practices.

Additionally through deploying IDeaS RMS, Hamilton Island gained access to an improved suite of management reports— many of which allow staff to drill right down to a daily or market segment level, for a 12-month period across all properties. These reports are also useful for many areas across the business including sales, marketing and operations, and the culture of the organisation has become more focused on revenue management as a result.

These benefits have helped lead to an impressive increase in revenue. Over the past 12 months at the Reef View Hotel alone, the hotel has seen a transient room night gain in excess of 3,500 room nights and a transient revenue gain of 6.7 percent.

“The level of service provided by the team at IDeaS has been second to none. From the initial project scoping to implementation, and ongoing client relationship management and care, the team at IDeaS have made it their business to fully understand the complexities of ours. At every step they have worked with us to ensure IDeaS RMS is employed in such a way that its full potential is being maximised now and well into the future,” Perham said.