Whether you’re responsible for one hotel or an entire portfolio, there are certain revenue management tasks that are simply too repetitive and add little value for the time they take.
NB: This is an article from Duetto
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For example, gathering data in an Excel spreadsheet for pricing decisions or manually adding in rate recommendations to your PMS.
To alleviate these issues and unlock more resources to drive revenue, you can adopt a “manage by exception” strategy.
What is a manage by exception strategy?
A manage by exception strategy utilizes a revenue management system (RMS) to automate daily, repetitive tasks, giving you time to focus on identifying and building strategies for your highest demand days. With an accurate demand forecast, you can more easily identify compressed nights far into the future, 365 days and beyond, giving you more time to enact optimal pricing, marketing, and distribution strategies.
Simplify your processes to save time
Assembling data is a great example of how you can simplify your processes. For decades, revenue managers have been running reports in property management systems (PMSs) and assembling them in Excel using macros. Today, custom report builders compile more real-time information, saving you hours every day.
You may still be manually pushing rates to your PMS. In a traditional best available rate (BAR) system, where one rate is pushed and each segment rate is a derivative of BAR, this might not be so complicated. But with today’s complex pricing strategies where each segment and room type is yielded independently for each day as far out as a year into the future, automating these price pushes saves an immense amount of hours.
Identify and build strategies for high-demand days
Let’s face it, in certain parts of the year, a Tuesday night at your hotel is likely to look very similar to the past Tuesday. You shouldn’t have to focus on these days, which is where an RMS comes into play.
Managing by exception will help you and your revenue teams identify those days where you should be spending more time, where human judgment is required. This allows you to alter any outstanding digital marketing campaigns, change the marketing strategy overall, and interface with the general manager and sales teams to make sure they understand the vision for capitalizing on these high-demand days.
Share your strategy with your team
When other key stakeholders like management companies, asset managers, or brands are monitoring a pricing strategy, they need to be made aware that you might run a slightly lower occupancy later into the booking window because you’re confident that demand is going to be really strong at the end, for example.
Having patience to not sell out too early, and let your competitors fill up faster than you, is a human conversation that needs to happen and can’t be communicated purely by an RMS. As it becomes more and more crucial for revenue teams to communicate across the entire hospitality organization and ensure alignment on strategy, managing by exception will free up time for those conversations.
Automate to alleviate
Adopting a manage by exception strategy helps free up your time from repetitive tasks, so you identify and prioritize high-demand days, and collaborate more effectively with your sales and marketing teams, to increase your overall profitability.
