Whether you’re overseeing a luxurious beachfront resort, a beautiful mountainside ski destination, a golf-lover’s paradise or even something a little outside of a “typical” resort hotel property profile, one thing is crystal clear: Effective revenue management for these properties is tough to get right.
Optimal resort revenue management requires organizations to look beyond the guestroom as they seek to maximize revenue. Ideally, resort hoteliers need to understand which guests are likely to spend the most overall during their stay—and even better, understand which guests are most profitable.
To do this the “old fashioned” manual way with siloed data and convoluted spreadsheets is a time-consuming, error-prone, and maddeningly complex process. It’s an effort that will leave even the most mathematically brilliant revenue leaders ready to settle for “good enough” when “optimal” is currently in reach.
That’s right. Advanced resort hotel revenue management systems are now more than capable of tackling the challenge of driving optimal revenue and profitability recommendations through advanced forecasting and automation.
Resorts revenue management made easy: How tech is tackling key challenges
So how can tools aid your resort’s approach to revenue management? Let’s take a closer look at some key revenue management related challenges.
The Challenge: Managing and responding to the highly variable demand and fast-shifting market conditions found in the resort industry is complex. Resorts must strategically manage a diverse array of products spanning a sprawling web of rooms, experience packages, loyalty member offerings and more. This complexity makes granular demand forecasting and the implementation of optimal dynamic pricing strategies a time-consuming and challenging—if not impossible—task through manual efforts.
How G3 RMS Helps You: With advanced demand forecasting capabilities leverage powerful modelling and computing power to quickly detect market shifts and optimize pricing and inventory controls. The system provides precise, optimized controls that prioritize the most valuable business across all room types, guest segments, and selling channels, ensuring that resorts can react swiftly to changes and fill their properties with the most valuable mix of guests.
Why It Matters: Accurate demand forecasting and the ability to deploy dynamic pricing strategies enable revenue teams to maximize revenue by quickly responding to demand fluctuations and optimizing room inventory.
For example, if a large group booking unexpectedly cancels, G3 RMS can immediately adjust pricing strategies to capitalize on the opportunity. The system automates both the complex mathematics driving forecasting and the repetitive tasks associated with implementing a complex, demand-based dynamic pricing strategy. This frees up revenue leaders to focus less on the “button pushing” and more on guiding the overall strategy. The result is exceptional performance, driving longer stays, stronger shoulder nights, and higher average daily rates, ultimately boosting the resort’s profitability.
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The Challenge: Identifying, prioritizing, and attracting the guest segments who are likely to generate the most revenue, particularly when considering ancillary “non-room” spending.
How G3 RMS Helps You: The system helps by suggesting optimized controls that automatically prioritize the most valuable demand for all arrival dates and lengths of stay.
Why It Matters: Guest behaviors aren’t uniform. Factors like price sensitivity, likelihood for ancillary spending, and more can all have a significant influence on determining which guest segments should be prioritized and how to attract them. This can drive improved marketing effectiveness, generate additional revenue, and simplify the process of attracting the ‘ideal’ business mix.
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The Challenge: Evaluating and understanding the revenue impact of prospective group business opportunities.
How G3 RMS Helps You: The group pricing evaluation feature can help you quickly conduct a displacement analysis (comparing how the group opportunity’s revenue stacks up to the projected revenue potential of rooms for transient demand). This evaluation tool can also suggest “break even” and “optimal” pricing for the group—an incredible asset during the negotiation process. Furthermore, with Function Space Revenue Management capabilities, hoteliers can also fold in F&B, ancillary spending, and event space data to understand the overall profitability of a group opportunity.
Why It Matters: Group business is a critical component of any resort revenue strategy. Using a powerful group analysis tool gives you flexibility in price negotiations by offering alternate dates or venue options that are mutually acceptable (and profitable). With a shared, clearer view of an opportunity’s overall value and how it likely compares to the alternative, sales and RM teams can take a collaborative approach to negotiations and make smarter group pricing decisions.
“As a company we adopted this tool becauseyou get buy-in very early in the process. Right away, revenue and the sales department have what they need to know to get aligned on an opportunity—it’s been great. There are times when we decide we need to ‘break the rules’ set by revenue management, but we’re doing that together as a commercial team.”
The challenge: Using guest data to inform personalization, guest experience, and revenue management strategies.
How G3 RMS helps you: Centrally positioned within your resort’s technology stack, G3 RMS enables hotels to tap into valuable granular data to improve guest segmentation, implement optimized personalized pricing, and refine inventory management strategies.
Why it matters: “Connecting the dots” between the systems that collect and produce guest data is the key to unlocking multiple guest experience and profitability-enhancing initiatives. When you know which guests are more likely to spend—and what they’ll want to spend it on—you have a foundation for building effective upselling campaigns, promotional packages, and pricing strategies.
Resort revenue optimization: A destination worth the trip
Revenue management for resorts is not for the faint of heart. These properties pull out all the stops to deliver unforgettable guest experiences without losing sight of the bottom line—all while never letting the guests see them sweat it. It’s a tricky act to get right, but with the powerful tech tools at their disposal, resorts revenue leaders are now able to make what would be a Herculean effort into something far more achievable.
