For individual hotels, revenue management does what it’s meant to do. Rates are optimized, demand is forecasted, and results are easy to evaluate at the property level.
NB: This is an article from Duetto
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As hotel groups grow beyond a handful of assets, though, that approach begins to strain:
→ Demand doesn’t stay neatly contained.
→ Pricing decisions affect neighboring properties.
→ Group and transient business overlap across markets and time horizons.
→ Revenue teams are asked to manage more hotels, without additional headcount.
Many groups respond by scaling traditional hotel revenue management across more properties. On paper, it looks centralized. In reality, execution is still happening hotel by hotel.
The result? Pricing logic drifts. Forecasts fall out of sync. And leaders can see more, but act less cohesively. Revenue silos start to form, driving margin leakage, inconsistent portfolio performance, and slower response to shifts in demand.
That’s the challenge mid-size and growing hotel chains are facing today. This article goes deeper into why property-level revenue management falls short at the portfolio level – and what needs to change for teams to move from visibility to coordination.
Why property-by-property revenue management breaks at scale
Traditional hotel revenue management systems were designed to optimize individual hotel performance. Because of that, even when rolled out across a portfolio, they tend to still operate as a collection of separate environments rather than a single operating model.
As portfolios grow, a few predictable issues start to surface:
1. Decisions are optimized locally instead of collectively
A pricing move that improves one hotel’s short-term performance can create imbalance elsewhere in the portfolio – through channel conflict, demand cannibalization, or forecasting noise.
Because those downstream effects aren’t always visible in the moment, teams optimize in good faith at the property level. Over time, those local optimizations compound, turning hotel-by-hotel gains into uneven performance, margin leakage, and revenue silos across the portfolio.
2. Forecasting starts to fragment
Property-level forecasts are built on different assumptions, confidence levels, and update cycles. By the time they’re rolled up for leadership, attention shifts from acting on the numbers to explaining why they don’t align.
Instead of surfacing where teams can still intervene, forecasting becomes a reconciliation exercise. That erodes confidence in the forecast as a planning tool and limits its usefulness for multi-property revenue management.
