Many of you in the hospitality business may remember the days when people had only three ways to make a reservation: by mail, by phone, by walking in, and the price-rack rate-for that room was the same for all three categories.
However, as towns turned into cities and boarding-house style hotels turned into the everything-included-in-a-suit hotels of today, and travelers had more than one choice of hotels to choose from, new ways of marketing, new ways of attracting business, new ways of "looking at things", and new ways of accounting also had to be devised to manage and attract a steady stream of guests. Note 🙁 Airlines started this trend)
Enter the Revenue Manager (RM): part statistician, economist, trends reader, number of guests guesser, and room rate setter: the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly supreme prognosticator.
For the better RMs, it wouldn't hurt to be part sociologist, psychologist, and historian.
And for the outstanding RMs, it wouldn't hurt to be knowledgeable about current trends in living space design, art philosophy, design and color psychology and trends, etc.
The days of RMs just being number crunchers is long gone . . . or are they?
RMs have to synthesize information from a variety of objective and subjective data and then analyze and evaluate that data to formulate a plan that will fill hotel rooms with paying guests steadily throughout the year.
Not an easy thing to do.
The RM is a typical example of the oft quoted "Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door", which can easily be modified to "Build a better hotel management system, and the world will beat a path to your hotel."
Many years ago while visiting a property I was talking to the night auditor.
I had mentioned that the rooms were very nice and that they could be sold for a higher rate.
He told me "The revenue manager doesn't feel they are worth it".
Is that the kind of answer that should be given? How effective do think that Revenue manager is?
I would guess not very effective. A revenue manager must have faith in the product that he or she is representing, if not get out of the business.
Yesterday it was basic room maximum revenue-today it is, in essence, room demand that sets the price. But for that to happen, that RM better have his/her stats correct in order for that demand to payoff.
The RM position has evolved over the past decade or so into an executive position that works closely with the sales department-both are integral to each other's success.
Constant, continuous tweaking and data integration is the RM's order of the day, if he/she expects to keep ahead of the competition. Weekly if not daily meetings during peak seasons with the departments that are affected.
It is not a position for the weak.
You not only have to have the training and experience to do the job, you also must have "gut instinct/feeling."
In fact, having a good "gut instinct/feeling" may well be the most important element that separates good RM's from the excellent RM's.
Is your gut instinct up to the job?
The Hotel Guy
Alan Campbell has been in Las Vegas for over 30 years and has worked for the major strip hotels. He has spent some time in California, Los Angeles where he worked for the Radisson and Sheraton hotels. Alan considers the hospitality industry the best job in the world – it is the only place that both kings and Paupers will visit you.
