Every hotel has a revenue management strategy. Not every hotel has a good one. The gap between the two is where the real money lives, and closing it usually starts with an honest look at what’s actually happening versus what everyone assumes is happening.
NB: This is an article from Topline Revenue, one of our Expert Partners
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The good news is that most of these mistakes are fixable. The less good news is that they’re also surprisingly common, even in properties with experienced teams and solid tools. Here’s what to watch for.
Pricing Off Last Year’s Numbers Like the Market Stood Still
Last year’s data is a starting point, not a strategy. A surprising number of hotels close out the year, pull their prior rate structure, apply a percentage uplift that feels about right, and call it a pricing plan. It looks like planning. It’s really just copying with a little optimism baked in.
The market you’re pricing into this year is not the same one you were in last year. Demand drivers shift. Your comp set changes. Booking behaviour evolves. If the forward strategy isn’t being built off what’s actually happening right now, including live pickup data, current booking window trends, and real channel mix shifts, it’s a wish list with a spreadsheet attached to it.
A real forward-looking pricing strategy accounts for:
- Segment-level pickup showing how demand is building week over week
- Booking window comparisons that reveal whether guests are booking earlier, later, or through different channels than before
- Event and compression analysis that identifies genuine demand drivers rather than assumed ones
- Channel mix shifts that affect both the volume and the cost of incoming bookings
If your forecasting process isn’t being tested against live market signals on a regular basis, it’s probably confirming your assumptions more than it’s challenging them.
The Forecast That Never Gets Updated
A forecast built three months ago that nobody has touched since isn’t a planning tool anymore. Markets move. A static forecast doesn’t move with them, which means every decision being made against it is working from an increasingly inaccurate picture. Updating the forecast regularly isn’t extra work. It’s how the forecast stays useful.
