When you take over a hotel as a revenue manager, two clocks start running at the same time. The first is the performance one. Ownership and the GM want results, and they want them quickly. You have a budget to deliver on, that may have been set well before you arrived on the scene, and targets to meet with the expectation that things will improve on your watch.
NB: This is an article from Lighthouse
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The second is the learning curve. The property has a history, a strategy and a set of embedded decisions that shaped its current performance in ways you won’t fully understand on day one.
Most revenue managers focus on the first and underestimate the second. The ten actions in this article help you to navigate both.
Finding quick wins in the compset and rate structure
1) Audit your compset
Quite often, the compset you inherit has been in place for a while and may not be the one you’d have built yourself. The properties your predecessor tracked may have been the right frame of reference two years ago, but hotels reposition, renovate and change ownership and therefore may not be as relevant to who your property competes with today. Markets, too, have shifted. Some competitors are no longer competing for the same guest profile as they were before.
Before you use it to make a single rate decision, verify it. The practical test is whether a guest booking your hotel today would consider each of these properties as a genuine alternative.
Run a search on the main OTAs to see who appears alongside you when filtering for key amenities, location, and hotel size, as this is how many guests are weighing their options. Check each competitor’s current positioning, room type mix and channel strategy. Add any short-term rental inventory pulling demand in your key segments. Remove any properties that no longer belong.
What the inherited list shows and what the market actually looks like are often quite different things.
