With just a small percentage of difference in your hotel’s RevPAR between success and underperformance, the role of the Revenue Manager (RM) is crucial to hotels.
With the start of a new year, comes the perfect opportunity to re-educate ourselves on what makes a good Revenue Manager, and what you can do in January to be the best in the year ahead.
The job description may vary from hotel to hotel, but one thing that stays the same is the ability to optimise profit and increase the average daily rate (ADR) for the hotel.
This is a two-pronged process, the first being to crunch booking data to develop the most effective rates and revenue optimising strategies.
The second being, to filter this information throughout the hotel staff members who implement your strategies and rates. This is particularly important for the Marketing team, who use these rates to form their special offers and messaging.
The latter is the most challenging to achieve, motivating a workforce to implement your recommendations across the board can be tricky. Therefore, the skills required of a Revenue Manager don’t revolve purely around mathematical and technical capability, to do the job effectively you must also be a great communicator.
With this in mind, here is our list of what Revenue Managers should do
#1: Get to know your colleagues – successful RM’s have topnotch relationship skills.
Get to know your team at the top of the year, make an extra effort to catch up with managers and those who will help you implement your strategies across the hotel teams. In a small hotel this is easily done, but for bigger hotels, chains and groups it can be more challenging.
#2: Envisage your goals for the year, what do you hope to achieve?
The beginning of the year is a great time to set yourself targets and envisage the top line changes you’d like to achieve for your hotel during the quarter and year ahead.
