Every general manager I have ever spoken to describes their revenue manager the same way. Experienced. On top of the numbers. Across the data. It is a description delivered with confidence, and it is almost always sincere.
NB: This is an article from Demand Calendar
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It is also, in most hotels, quietly and significantly wrong.
Not about the person. About the role.
Frame One: What “On Top of the Numbers” Actually Looks Like
Picture your revenue manager’s morning. Not the output – the process.
They arrive at their desk. They open the PMS. They pull last night’s pickup and copy the relevant figures into a spreadsheet. They check the OTA extranets one by one – Booking.com, Expedia, whatever others are in the mix – and reconcile the numbers. They open the rate-shopping tool and manually record where the comp set sits. They pull the STR report if it has landed. They check the RMS for any recommendations it has generated overnight. Then they begin building the daily summary – the report that will land in your inbox by nine o’clock.
By the time the report is finished, it is somewhere between 9.30 and 10.00 am.
Two hours have passed. Zero strategic decisions have been made.
Your revenue manager has not analysed anything yet. They have not looked at pace for the coming six weeks, or interrogated a segment shift, or compared this Tuesday’s pickup velocity against the same Tuesday last year. They have collected. They have assembled. They have formatted.
They have done, in other words, exactly what a well-organised administrative assistant could do – and they have done it at a salary that reflects years of commercial expertise, market intuition, and strategic training.
This is what “on top of the numbers” looks like from the inside. From the outside, it looks like productivity. From inside the role, it looks like a very expensive morning routine.
Frame Two: The Role Has Been Quietly Redefined
Here is the uncomfortable truth that no one states directly: in most hotels, the revenue manager role has been redefined – not by anyone’s intention, but by the absence of the right infrastructure.
When data collection is manual, it consumes the hours that the strategy requires. When six systems do not talk to each other, someone has to make them talk – and that someone is the person who needs the data most. The revenue manager did not choose to become a data administrator. They became one because the alternative – making decisions without complete information – felt worse.
