In the first part of our series, we looked at 6 ways revenue managers can use data to make their hotel smarter.
However, a revenue manager’s job is bigger than data. After all, “decisions need to be 90% data and 10% knowledge” – that’s practically the motto for revenue managers!
A good RM’s skill set is constantly evolving and expanding, and it goes beyond data alone. There are many areas of hotel operations that aren’t data-centric, but where a revenue manager’s input is essential. Many of these are areas that directly affect your customers.
What are those areas? We examine 5 below. This isn’t an exhaustive guide, but it gives you the overview you need to make sure your hotel is on the right track. Let’s dive in:
5 customer concerns revenue managers need to address:
#1 What’s available to book?
There must be a fair portion of inventory loaded to each channel. If you are only loading 10% of your inventory to your brand site, don’t be too surprised when you figure out that that level of inventory is not enough to cover the given searches on a date for guests going through the booking process.
For example, say you have 5 rooms loaded to your brand site. If you get 100 searches a day, you are unavoidably going to get some searches coming back for guests as No Availability when over 5 searches are happening at the same time. This inevitably causes fewer bookings, and might lead to dissatisfied guests abandoning the idea of booking your hotel entirely. Loading availability that’s on par with your search volume is the way to avoid this.
#2: What’s the price?
There are two important factors to consider here:
- Are you priced correctly for the market you’re in and for your value proposition?
- Is there rate disparity across the different channels you’re on? If the price is lower on other sites, driving bookings through your brand site becomes much, much more difficult. For an examination into rate disparity, what causes it and what hoteliers can do to manage it, check out this article.
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