Many hotels share a similar struggle when it comes to breaking silos and collaborating effectively between revenue management and marketing. Both roles rely on data such as demand patterns, booking behavior, guest data such as feeder markets and demographics to shape their decision-making and capture revenue opportunities.
NB: This is an article from Lighthouse
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Both have vital insights to share, clever ideas to implement, and want to drive revenue. Creativity and data can – and should – align quite perfectly across revenue and marketing.
Yet, data sharing across departments, and mutually beneficial support isn’t always a given. For independent hoteliers, it’s especially important to understand how to encourage a more collaborative mindset.
Let’s start by looking at the basic steps collaborators from both departments should take to work more closely:
- Encouraging a mindset shift within your organization. Once you’ve committed to bridging the gap, the next step is to nurture this mindset among your staff from the top down of the business.
- Leveraging data-sharing and analysis. It’s all about using commercial data to create more opportunities. Identifying different types of data that marketing and revenue share to drive performance.
- The concept of non-price, promotional offers. By relying less on discounting, and more on delivering value outside of just the lowest available rate, your hotel can deliver more profit per booking.
- Refining your data. Even the most well-intentioned projects will fail if there are blind spots in your data. Good input equals good output. Collaboration and accountability across teams will improve if you are using quality data.
When marketing and revenue management collaborate effectively, you have a better chance of exceeding projections and delivering more revenue. It’s the kind of synergy where the whole equals more than the sum of its parts.
To achieve this level of beneficial knowledge sharing, to achieve this level of knowledge sharing, both disciplines must do their part to drive this initiative forward. Here’s how marketers and revenue managers can contribute to better alignment with their inter-departmental colleagues.
Encourage a collaborative mindset
Ideally, there’s an understanding (and an expectation) of collaboration already existing on both sides. Both departments want to maximize revenues but take different paths to reach this goal.
There are bound to be some silos and uneven information. Revenue managers see pricing as their primary lever, analyzing demand data and booking patterns to always set the right price, while marketers deploy advertising and promotions to optimize revenue.
This gap often results in wasted effort due to each team implementing conflicting methods. It sometimes seems like the two teams speak different versions of the same language.
