Our question is: How you can help reduce the pressure on your hotel management staff?
NB: This is an article from Right Revenue, one of our Expert Partners
As the UK emerged from lockdown and took tentative steps towards freedom, hotels have faced different challenges. The Summer Staycation market for many remains crazy-busy; lead times are short; cancellations are high, but for city hotels, in many cases, it is the reverse, with occupancies occasionally dipping to single digits.
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However, there seems to have been one theme which is common across the board – staffing issues, and this is reverberating throughout every department. Hotels were forced to make many of their teams redundant: furloughed staff have found other jobs; we have less International team members and now (towards the end of the summer season), we now face the added challenge of our younger team members returning to school, college or university.
Right Revenue, as you know, is not a recruitment agency and has no expertise in the field of recruitment, but it set us thinking about how technology and especially a Revenue Management System might be able to help.
The simple fact is that with less team members needing to multi-task over several roles, smart hoteliers are looking to technology to support these new and expanding job roles.
The answer to the question “Can a Revenue Management System help your recruitment woes?” is clearly no, but if we reconsider the question slightly, the answer becomes a resounding yes.
- Can an RMS help alleviate the pressure that your staff are under? Yes
- Can an RMS make your short-staffed team work more efficiently? Yes
- Can an RMS ensure you retain valuable staff? Yes
- Can an RMS ensure that the hotel still manages its rate effectively, despite the GM/FOM/DOSM/RM facing significant operational challenges? Yes
- Can an RMS facilitate accurate and analytical reporting without draining hours of staff time? Yes
- Can an RMS help multiple busy departments work together smarter? Yes
On a practical level, who does this actually help? You know the person we are talking about, it’s your most valued member of staff, trusted to wear a number of different hats, taking on various and mixed roles. Highly skilled Revenue Managers are now multi-tasking. Front Office Managers and Reservation Managers are now being asked to manage your very valuable rate strategy.
We understand that these are hugely varied and challenging roles at the best of times. Now factor in the staff shortages which means that this valued member of staff is probably covering busy phone lines, doing extra shifts to cover shortages on reception and dealing with a busy hotel full of very demanding guests, as well as training new members of your team and assisting with the recruitment of new staff.
Does this superstar have the time, energy or brain power to then manage the hotel’s revenue? To spend hours battling with various systems and excel spreadsheets just to extract some meaningful data? Then sit and analyse all of this (by now out-of-date) data before making decisions on rates? Then manually update the rates? Oh, and there’s a management meeting in the morning that this very valued team member has to prepare the reports for. Then our favourite – the owner wants an updated forecast for Q4 based on the summer trading and demand patterns!!!
Members of your team in this position are far more likely to make poor revenue decisions (or worse, avoid making any decisions at all); become stressed and fatigued and worse case (that we have seen so often over the past few months), resign…
So perhaps now is the time to offer the ‘superstar’ in your hotel a gift?! The gift of a data-driven forecast. The gift of profit-driven rate recommendations. The gift of visual dashboard reporting. Of pre-loaded pick-up reports, and daily insight on competitor rates. And best of all, the gift of time…
Let technology do the heavy lifting (and a very blatant plus here for Right Revenue), relieve the pressure on your staff and help ensure you get the most profitable rate strategy for your changing markets.
In short – We do the ‘smarts’ to let your team focus on what is important… the strategy.
