As revenue managers, we eat sleep and breathe reports, channels, daily rates, pace, etc – but are we articulating the importance of these items to other teams within our organization?
NB: This is an article from Rainmaker
Having a regular revenue strategy meeting is extremely important in creating a revenue management culture within your organization. In our webinar last week, we highlighted some tips & tricks to ensure you are maximizing the value of your revenue strategy meetings and ensuring that everyone feels they have a vested interest in the collective revenue strategy.
Meeting Basics
Frequency
- Meetings should occur on a weekly or bi-weekly basis and last no longer than two hours
- Host the meeting in board room with enough space for all participants and include necessary items such as a projector or a speaker phone if any participants are remote
Meeting Structure
- Agenda to be sent 24 hours before the start of the meeting
- Ask for feedback for any additional agenda items
- Break out the agenda by department
- Meeting requests with day, time and location should be sent in advance
After the Meeting
- Notes should be sent to all attendees and include those who missed
- Projects should be assigned to individuals with estimated completion dates
Attendees
- Revenue Management
- Marketing: Hotel Marketing, Database Marketing, Casino Marketing
- Convention Sales
- Operations: Front Desk, Reservations
- Executive Leadership
Departmental Topics
Revenue Management
Since this is the revenue strategy meeting, after all, your RM team will likely lead the meeting and consume a large piece of the agenda. However, we want to be sure we are incorporating items that are beneficial to all the other departments involved. Some topics to discuss include:
- Forecast: Forecasts allow you to be proactive and stay ahead of changes in your market. You will want to review historical results for the past week/month and be sure you are reviewing your forecasts within a 120-day window.
- Calendar: Focus your time on items such as: special events, holidays and your extended window (for example, if a big convention or event is coming to your market 6-8 months down the road).
Once you have reviewed your forecasts, you are now able to implement strategies for concerned dates. You can discuss deploying targeted marketing promotions to help fill low demand periods or if periods have high demand, you may want to close off promotions and raise your rates.
- Reporting: Within revintel, our business intelligence platform, we can load your operational forecast and budget, so you can view your pick-up, ADR and revenue differentials by month and talk about those variances.
- Pace: Review what you have on the books for current year versus same time last year and what those variances are to quickly see where you are ahead or behind pace. This will allow you to focus your attention on segments that are pacing down. For example, maybe you’re down on Booking.com or Expedia and you are now able to drill into the “why” and have collective discussions on the best course of action.
Marketing
Your marketing team members have a lot to bring to the table in a revenue strategy meeting. Your marketing team is here to help assist with the “valleys” in demand and ensure that you are running the right promotions at the right times. In the meeting you’ll want to review the marketing calendar and discuss details of new promotions and placement. You’ll also want to spend time reviewing the details of existing promotions, how past promotions performed, and how to change your strategies for future marketing promotions.
Convention Sales
Whether or not your property does a large amount of group business, it’s important to have your convention sales leaders in your revenue strategy meeting. With your sales leaders, you’ll want to discuss new and prospective business, pipeline, business reviews and metrics such as:
- Review any rates if there are questions
- Cutoff dates: How are your groups picking up? If groups are not picking up well and you have low demand, you could discuss extending that cut-off date.
- Blocks: Are blocks picking up well? If not, you may need to trim the blocks in your PMS.
- Overbooking or group wash strategies
- Review group room nights, room revenue and inquires on the books
- Alternate dates or concessions
Operations
Having the operations team present at the revenue strategy meeting keeps them informed on items such as:
- Arrivals & departures
- Upcoming projects: Out of order rooms, preventative maintenance and staffing concerns
- Guest service & online reviews
Executive Leadership
Having support and buy-in to the meeting decisions from executive leadership is vital to incorporating a revenue management culture within your organization. Executive leadership participation illustrates to all other departments that revenue strategy meetings are important to the overall success of the property. Their commitment to a successful revenue strategy will help to gain a commitment from all departments that allows you to optimize total revenue.
Creating a revenue management culture within your organization allows you to maximize total guest value and profitability in your organization. Having a revenue strategy meeting that is structured and beneficial to all parties involved will reiterate the need for this revenue management culture across all teams at your organization. However, the meeting does not end when everyone leaves the room. Revenue strategy should be implemented in your day-to-day discussions with team members at your property.
