NB: This is an article from IDeaS
Similar to many industry veterans, I’ve spent the vast majority of my adult life working in hotels. From operations to sales & catering to revenue management, I’ve overseen branded and independent properties, ranging from 500-room luxury resorts to 80-room limited service inns. Through my experiences I can say with certainty there has never been a more comprehensive, flexible revenue management approach than Ideal Pricing.
Whether it’s managing one property onsite – or 10 properties remotely – Ideal Pricing offers hotels a robust and fully automated approach to revenue management that helps with transient pricing, group business of all shapes and sizes, and even catering-only business. Ideal Pricing gives hotels complete flexibility to select a pricing methodology that not only meets the technical requirements of their selling systems, but still supports each property’s unique business goals.
What’s really exciting about the Ideal Pricing methodology is that it goes so much further than just pricing. It’s also about that other lever in revenue management – inventory control. A true revenue strategy allows revenue managers to flex both price and availability to achieve optimal revenue results. Ideal Pricing provides the ideal price to your ideal guest at the ideal time. If I was still a revenue manager, I would want my revenue strategy to deploy the ideal price to my guests and manage my inventory efficiently – not offer a rate that was simply open all the time.
I would also want a price that is analytically determined for each room type. A premium Ocean View Suite guest is completely different than a Garden View King guest, and the demand for those rooms needs to be calculated independently. While revenue managers likely have a hunch on an appropriate price differential between room types (and may find themselves right most of the time), why take the time to guess and why risk being wrong? Revenue managers have always had the ability to manually set room price differentials; PMS vendors have provided that capability for years. However, that’s not what makes a sophisticated revenue management system – an RMS should be able to determine those price points for hotels and deploy them to their distribution channels. This is exactly what Ideal Pricing delivers.
As an added bonus, these powerful, analytically-derived decisions are automatically pushed out to integrated selling systems and ultimately determine the best business to accept. These decisions are not recommendations that need to be continually reviewed and deployed. However, just as an airplane on auto-pilot still needs a pilot, hotels still need to oversee the overall operation. But instead of time spent manually uploading rates, revenue managers get that time back to focus more on strategy and staying nimble as market changes occur.
Today’s powerful RMS technology automatically deploys revenue strategies and helps revenue managers monitor through automated reports and checklists. If revenue managers are the conductors of their revenue strategy, think of the RMS as their orchestra. An orchestra can play on its own, but it’s the job of the conductor to keep the tempo, ensure smooth entries of group members and ultimately create a great symphony (known as a revenue strategy.)
The bottom line? Revenue management is not a flash in the pan – and it continues to expand into even more hospitality business units. Ideal Pricing is the only option in the market that – through automated pricing and inventory control – offers the most flexibility in transient pricing and delivers group and function space pricing with profitability analysis at the click of a mouse.
The Ideal Pricing approach will continue to drive innovation and optimize revenue in the hospitality industry. For progressive hotels looking to ride the wave of innovation or if they are just seeking a simple, scientific and strategic approach to their hotel revenue management strategy, IDeaS Ideal Pricing is without a doubt the ideal choice.
