The sleek silhouette of a vehicle effortlessly manoeuvres through a winding mountain pass. It accelerates into the distance – leaving a spray of mist from the dewy road. In the background, there’s an advertising voiceover talking through the car’s key features and encouraging you to test drive it today. It’s tempting, but will the car live up to its hype? Will it counter the myths you’ve already heard from others?
Hoteliers wonder the same thing about investing in some of the technology systems they know about. Will a Property Management System operate as effectively as an industry article said it would? Do you really need to be in the cloud? Will revenue management actually pay for itself and how can the system actually help generate profits?
To better understand a key operational technology such as revenue management, it is the perfect opportunity for hoteliers to take a virtual test drive and put some of the myths to the test:
Myth: We don’t have any issues manually setting our rates, so we don’t need a revenue management system
Many hoteliers operate with a heavy reliance on online travel agents (OTAs) and tactical “flash” sales. With constantly changing booking patterns, it’s nearly impossible to manually identify trends from hotel’s booking history. This makes it difficult for hotels to recognise changes in demand and react in time to make higher profits.
In such a high-speed environment, manually collecting, evaluating and calculating data via Excel spreadsheets is not only a tedious process, but it’s also time-consuming and highly susceptible to errors. It’s simply not possible to compile all of the data points required to provide meaningful forecasts and pricing decisions across a manageable time frame. By the time the data is aggregated and analysed, any identified opportunity will have likely passed.
This is where revenue management software and automation can make a huge difference. Through algorithms, calculations and machine learning, revenue management systems automatically assess hotel performance on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. Revenue managers can use highly visual dashboards and reports to quickly compare rooms sold and revenue against data at the market segment and total hotel level for the next year.
The system provides regular, updated reports; some systems extracting data up to four times a day. This gives revenue managers and hoteliers a clear vision of their data, bringing more accuracy and consistency—versus gut instinct—to the forecasting and reporting process. The increased business intelligence and accurate granular forecasting make it easier for revenue managers to determine correct pricing, optimise demand and increase revenue across their property or portfolio.
