The past few years have given birth to a wide variety of revenue management ‘best practices’ and tools, what’s the equation for success? Two of the major factors affecting a modern revenue manager’s success are the tools they are using, and how well RMs are integrating their knowledge with the ‘big picture’.
Today, we’re going to take you through 10 key trends in revenue management today. We won’t be looking at the timeless fundamentals, like pricing strategies, but rather at current trends and strategies.
These are the ones that we think are vital to strong revenue growth and growing your direct bookings, and they are the ones you should take advantage of if you want your profits to do more than just hold steady.
Here are the trends and techniques we’ll be covering:
- Increasing Profitability
- Seizing the Moment with Book Direct
- Planning Ahead
- Better Data (Tools)
- Technology
- Cost per Acquisition
- Mobile
- Embracing Collaboration
- Sharing the Knowledge
- Keeping In the Loop
-
Increasing Profitability
Increasing profitability is ultimately what we’re all trying to do. However, after challenging years where ‘heads in beds’ was almost the entire strategy, the focus today is shifting to ways to maximise your return on each channel in use. This includes both online and offline strategies.
What are the most important steps to achieving this? Start by evaluating the true value and cost for each channel, and developing a clear strategy for your approach to each channel. Without accurate cost of acquisition insights for each channel, you cannot know if the pricing strategy in use is actually the right and ultimately most profitable one.
For evaluating your online channels, try a hotel OTA spend calculator – it can be a good starting point to evaluate the cost of online channels, and show you the potential savings of increase direct bookings: here’s a good one to check out.
In our Revenue Management white paper, we compiled a list of the KPIs we recommend you monitor for your online channels in order to build direct bookings:
Read rest of the article at 4Hoteliers
