IDeaS Consulting Services Helps Kaiserhof Wien Revolutionise Their Revenue Management Approach

The Story

The Kaiserhof Wien is a privately owned hotel, priding itself on hospitality and service for eight generations. Located in a quiet cobbled street close to the historical heart of Vienna and near the famous Karlskirche church and Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde opera house, this hotel offers luxury at reasonable prices.

The hotel is committed to being the most technologically advanced in its competitive set, having made crucial investments in advanced solutions to streamline its distribution strategy. Using technology to automate analysis and distribute rates has streamlined and automated work efforts, providing the hotel’s revenue managers with the vital time they need to focus more on strategic planning.

The hotel leveraged the IDeaS Revenue Architect service to conduct a revenue performance and opportunity analysis that kick-started the process of creating a new revenue management culture. After achieving the goals set forth from the initial process, the hotel began accelerating their revenue management capabilities to the next level.

We had progressed our revenue management as far as we could with our own internal skill set and appreciated that to advance further, we needed to engage with external specialists. IDeaS is the market leader in revenue management, with a pedigree of over 25 years of collecting best practices across the globe and the experience which comes from managing over one million rooms. We knew they would be able to advise us best on evolving to our next stage of revenue management.

IDeaS Consulting Services approaches each client with a comprehensive awareness of the increasingly competitive nature of the hotel industry, and with the ability to provide advisement that complements every hotel’s unique situation. In doing so, the IDeaS advisors complete an assessment of the hotel’s current revenue management maturity, which reviews the existing people, processes and technology. This assessment helps further identify revenue management opportunities where the hotel can improve its capabilities.

Alongside the evaluation of the internal resources of Kaiserhof Wien, IDeaS Consulting Services focussed on topics such as market repositioning and pricing to identify any areas that would provide Kaiserhof Wien with market opportunities. This discovery process uncovered the hotel’s main challenges, their significant pain points and enabled their team to establish the appropriate competitive set for price comparison. It also provided tactical guidance on best practices to handle promotions.

Another key output for the Kaiserhof Wien team during the discovery session was a recognition that further opportunities existed with pricing controls in periods of high demand (such as key events, congresses and peak seasons), specifically, restricting lower rate levels. Identifying this was made possible through the effective utilisation of benchmarking data—exposing competitive data that Kaiserhof Wien could apply effectively to their automated selling strategy.

“We now have a pathway to enhancing our revenue management approach, which we mapped out with the consulting team from IDeaS,” added Chmela. “Their help was essential in guiding us through our revenue management capability review and, thanks to their insight, we are confident that we are improving on our past revenue management performance.”