Hotel revenue management in uncertain times becomes a very tricky endeavor. To be successful at it, one has to have the knowledge, experience, and access to the right tools, such as hotel software with advanced revenue management features.
NB: This is an article by mycloud Hospitality
Brexit is one of those scenarios in which revenue managers have to give their best to help their establishments survive the UK’s bumpy departure.
The date is very close. Brexit will take place at some point. This will impact many sectors, hospitality included. Forecasting is one of many things revenue managers can pursue to accommodate Brexit implications.
What Do the Reports Say
The hospitality industry has already begun the transformation because Brexit is just around the corner. Certain trends in the industry tell us that things are rather more complicated than we previously took them to be.
The global head of leisure and hospitality, Will Hawkley shares his insights on the current industry trends that are worth your while:
- Hoteliers have to adopt new technologies to serve the growing demands of personalization of the client and guest experience.
- Projections tell us that leisure expenses are bound to grow, as hotels invest in providing a more enjoyable and engaging experience.
- There are more acquisitions and mergers taking place in the industry than ever before.
Brexit’s Impact on the Trends of Travelers
Brexit has affected the wallets of UK citizens as well. The value of the pound has decreased over the course of the past two years. At the same time, wages stagnated. All of this made it more logical for UK citizens to spend less on their holidays. This makes it harder for hoteliers and definitely affects their projected revenues. Some of the hotels and restaurants responded by custom-tailoring their offers.
Wage stagnation and the value of the pound dropping inevitably leads to more opportunities in inbound tourism. Meanwhile, staycation is becoming a very popular practice among UK citizens. This is another important fact revenue managers have to be aware of if they want to ensure profits in the days to come after Brexit. Here are the major pain-points of travelers once Brexit happens.
On the other hand, forecasting the accuracy of a decision and the performance of strategies has become more challenging, as the number of factors involved has increased. This task falls on hotel revenue management. Revenue managers have to compile as much data as they can and put that hotel revenue management software to good use if they want to see the results.
How Should Hoteliers Plan Accordingly?
The facts that Brexit has made staycations more popular these days and caused the stagnation of wages are too vague to plan the future for a hotel based on them. The answer lies in futurecasting, which is not a brand new thing in the business world.
Many industries are already using it to make strategic decisions and prepare the company for future challenges. But to be able to develop an insightful vision of the future, hoteliers have to leverage all the data they can.
For instance, revenue management software can help with compiling the data on sales trends across all booking channels, parity monitoring tools provide insights into the customer behavior in the target market, while the PMS compiles all this data and allows you to access it via one platform.
Futurecasting heavily depends on the hotel’s business data intelligence practices. The ventures that have been using the above-mentioned software solutions have a competitive advantage since they already have the data to work with.
They can use this data to align their strategies and teams and devise more appropriate strategies to mitigate the risk Brexit brings. But it is not too late for hotels to adopt some of these technologies to start gathering actionable data this very moment.
How Can Futurecasting Help Hoteliers?
We have already mentioned that inbound tourism has become a more logical option for UK travelers. With the data at their disposal, revenue managers can target the inbound markets of their interest and identify the trends in those markets.
They can focus their efforts on gathering more data for these markets to improve the accuracy of the forecast, and eventually improve its efficiency once they have their hands on more fresh and relevant data.
Revenue management software can help managers to identify the most profitable channels, optimize their pricing strategy, focus on more effective marketing strategies, and ultimately, drive more profitable direct bookings.
The scope of Brexit and its implications on the hospitality industry is not an open book everyone can easily read. This is why there is business intelligence data. It is never too late to innovate your business and invest in software tools to help you gather and analyze business data.
This will put you in a position to feed your future-casting with relevant data and be able to make strategic decisions to accommodate the UK’s departure from the EU.
