The realm of a hotel revenue strategist often comprises a conflicting jumble of processes and competing platforms. This can cause major heartaches as revenue managers struggle to keep their hotels competitive and profitable.
NB: This is an article from Rainmaker
But when you have the right hotel tech stack in place, and have a shared plan with all your departments, inefficiencies are replaced with streamlined operations. And revenue managers finally have time to focus on strategy development to drive long-term revenue growth.
Accessing the Right Data
According to the Future of Hotel Management Systems study, deeper integration of the property management system (PMS) with their existing technology landscape was a top concern of surveyed hotel executives. And more than 75 percent of hoteliers believe that their PMS, central reservation system (CRS), and revenue management system (RMS) don’t communicate well. A lack of integration between your hotel technology solutions leads to inefficiency and lost revenues.
Effectively optimizing room revenue requires a combination of yield management – managing your inventory – and pricing strategy. Revenue management may have access to basic inventory numbers, but the correct market segmentation and pace information is also needed to make accurate pricing recommendations. Trying to manage this manually by wading through the vast amount of available data takes up too much time and creates unnecessary risk.
Having an integration between key systems gives every manager and department real-time snapshots of critical data, insight into your RM strategy, and gives a single version of the truth. Your systems are only as good as the information you are putting in to it – having a strong PMS, CRS and RMS integration strategy gives you much cleaner data to make more informed decisions and a stronger revenue optimization (RO) strategy.
Sharing the Data
Once you have the data all the right information to inform your pricing strategy you need to be sure all the appropriate people (and systems) have that same data and strategy so they can carry it out. If the correct pricing recommendations based on forecasts, events, promotions, or current availability aren’t shared, you can’t ensure the best pricing strategy is being presented to guests.
A great example of this is when a guest is trying to book a room during specific dates, your PMS knows there were recent cancellations that allow ample room inventory for this stay, but the price being recommended still reflects a low inventory rate. This could stop a customer from booking because the price doesn’t match the demand, and most likely doesn’t match competitor rates.
The PMS and CRS need to share up to date rates and availability information to your RMS to ensure best recommendations on rates and restrictions are being communicated back to your PMS, and ultimately your guests. Having a fully integrated tech stack allows information to easily flow between systems so as one is updated, the others follow suit without manual effort.
Communicating Between Teams
Every department within your property possesses data that can help drive greater revenues. However, when each group functions independently from one another, and keeps their valuable data under wraps, your property will face tensions in developing strategies. And optimizing profits will become that much harder.
Recent technologies and advanced science can eliminate departmental separation, allowing you to tightly integrate and analyze data from disparate areas to create a single snapshot of each customer segment. Hoteliers can then work together as a property, to communicate information easily and share it with stakeholders throughout your property.
Communication between teams is key. By maintaining open communication between marketing, sales, operations, and revenue strategy, each staff member will understand how their role complements and supports the property and ultimately the goal of increased profitability.
When your systems and teams are working together you’ll have everything at your fingertips that you need to make more informed decisions and develop the most effective profit optimization strategy for your hotel.
Share the love this Valentine’s Day, and work to make sure your teams, data and your systems are working together to increase hotel revenue.
