With more data and more decisions to make than ever, this isn’t your father’s field of revenue management. Automation is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a must-have necessity.
But an automated revenue management system (RMS) isn’t here to replace smart humans; it’s here to help them rise up in their hospitality careers. An RMS is key to helping commercial teams generate the right data insights to adapt quicker to competitive intelligence, drive operational efficiencies, manage available inventory, and support central revenue management operations from clusters to entire estates.
No longer is the RMS the sole domain of the revenue manager. As hospitality organizations restructure around forward-looking commercial strategies, those who know their way around an RMS will hold the power that comes with sharing accurate intelligence and making confident decisions. And a sophisticated RMS isn’t just for enterprise chains but rather hospitality businesses of all types and sizes, from boutiques to all-inclusives and casinos to campgrounds.
Demand has changed forever. Even as occupancy rebounds, the mix of your business will be different moving forward. And not just demand has changed—there are significant shifts in supply in many markets, due to local public health orders and competition to keep an eye on now more than ever.
People and technology can account for these factors, but if circumstances have changed, so should how you view and interpret the data for decision-making. Only when using adaptable, well-integrated revenue technology will you be able to harness the full power of your data to optimize revenue and outpace your competition.
Agile Pricing
Whether demand is high or low, business has shifted to different segments or guest booking trends have changed. An automated RMS enables hotels to price all their business competitively and confidently under any circumstance. While RevPAR indices and ADR are on the path to recovery in many markets, the best opportunity to generate revenue efficiently is to ensure you capture the right business at the right price. Capitalizing as demand recovers requires an advanced RMS with versatile pricing that can:
- Dynamically price key products like advance purchase or loyalty discounted rate plans
- Independently price by room type, segment or channel
- Optimally set price by length of stay
- Factor in demand, guest willingness to pay, room-type hierarchy and the true influence of competitors
These capabilities combined with automatically managing rate availability, upgrades and room overbooking will ensure your property balances accepting the most valuable business with maximizing revenue from available inventory.
Responsive Analytics
Powerful and proactive analytics provide the compass needed to navigate market changes and demand shifts. The predictive analytics of a leading RMS factor in many data sources, and yes, historical data is a small piece of the optimization cycle and still relevant for understanding pricing patterns, demand patterns, length of stay, and booking behavior.
More importantly, advanced analytics evaluate future on-the-books and pace, price sensitivity, market data, unconstrained demand, and even prices by room type and/or market segment, ensuring you drive the most profitable business to your property to help you recover faster.
Manage by Exception
No more manual rate updates in selling systems. No more time-consuming evaluations of competitor data and setting inventory and rate controls. No more spreadsheets. Basic tactical activities are automated, and through alerts or notifications you are made aware when there are significant changes or situations that require your intervention.
Use free time to create revenue strategies and make decisions that drive revenue in the long term. You’ve learned to do more with less, so it’s important to ensure the team has the right tools and intelligent automation needed to efficiently manage your revenue strategy while enabling time to support other areas of your business.
Maximize Groups
The group pricing and evaluation capabilities of an advanced RMS go well beyond a simple displacement analysis, and they give sales managers the insights needed to capture the most profitable group business. We are entering a unique time for group business, in some regions small in-person events are returning while the hybrid virtual/in-person format will continue to evolve and grow in sophistication. It’s more important than ever to ensure you take the right pieces of business at the right time.
As with any business or revenue plan for a company, successful adaptability is not determined by knowing what specific outcome will occur but by understanding all possible outcomes and then assembling an agile strategy to achieve optimal performance each step of the way.
Choose Wisely
Today’s hospitality tech stack must be as seamless and integrated as the guest experience it supports. It should balance user ease and efficiency with data-driven profitability and decision empowerment. With a cutting-edge RMS at the core of the connected technology ecosystem, hospitality organizations will be enabled to think outside the guest room toward total profit optimization of all revenue streams.
Download the Hospitality Revenue Management Ultimate Buyer’s Guide to ensure you know the right questions to ask of RMS providers, find the best solution for your hotel type and user role, and select a revenue technology partner for scale.
