Travel Daily sat down with Rachel Grier, Asia-Pacific Managing Director for IDeaS Revenue Solutions to discuss technology, MICE and the potential of “free sell”.
Why should hotels be looking at non-room revenues to drive hotel profitability today?
As the hotel industry becomes more competitive, properties are increasingly scrutinising both the top and bottom line of all revenue generating areas. It is no longer enough to rely on revenues generated from room bookings alone.
Function spaces in hotels, and the areas dedicated to meetings and events, can often account for up to 60 percent of a hotel’s overall revenues in APAC. These spaces are significant profit drivers for a property, but significant revenue opportunity can be missed if these spaces go undersold or unsold altogether.
How can hoteliers grow revenues from function spaces?
To grow function space revenues, it is essential to combine revenue management strategies with sales and catering processes. Today there are cloud-based, visual strategy management solutions on the market to help hotels analyse and dissect business trends and meeting space performance for their properties. These tools visually consolidate data from sales and catering systems to help hotel teams strategically manage property functions and collaborate on ideal pricing strategies to enhance revenues.
To achieve optimal levels of revenue and profitability from meetings and events, hoteliers also need to incentivise their sales team on achieving quality of business, rather than quantity. Having the right forecasting, data and metrics in place may not result in optimal business, without the sales team delivering the right piece of business with the greatest profit impact to the hotel. Sales teams, therefore, need to be incentivised appropriately on the right measurements, to channel their focus on quality of business, rather than on single-dimensional metrics such as sale volume or space occupancy.
