Hotel competition across the Asia-Pacific region is fierce—and it only continues to grow and evolve with changing business models and sharing economy entrants.

To achieve profitability goals in such challenging environments, hotels need to ensure they have the right people, processes and technology in place to capitalise on all revenue opportunities and eliminate unnecessary costs.

Keep operational costs under control

There is no point to a hotelier in trying to grow profits if they cannot get their operational costs under control. Accurate demand forecasting should be at the foundation of optimal labour scheduling. Through integrating forecasts across a hotel’s operations, hoteliers can use the forecast data provided to inform their staffing decisions and account for periods of higher or lower demand.

Using this data, staffing managers can determine which areas are most affected by the number of guests staying in the hotel. For example, looking at how the number of occupants will affect the housekeeping needs, the number of staff needed on the front desk, the number of servers who will be required in restaurants and valets to park cars, etc.

In the same way forecasting can be applied to achieve optimal staffing levels and reduce unnecessary wages, it can also be used to match ordering quantities from external suppliers to minimise any wastage and supply costs.

Track new business acquisition cost and channel performance

When applying big data in practice, hotels have the ability to drill deeper into booking data to extract and analyse behaviour-based trends, enabling revenue managers to obtain a comprehensive understanding of guests and costs. Data gathered in relation to revenue management can help track channel performance, in particular as it relates to channel costs. It includes direct channels such as the hotel’s own branded website and indirect channels such as OTAs.

To accurately track channel costs, it is critical that effective best practices and standards are structured around the proper use of business coding and data collection. This ensures the available data is both accurate and suitable for digging into new channel performance opportunities.

Another critical element is identifying the true cost of new business acquisition. The depth and breadth of charges related to a reservation are often more complex than they appear. Considerations must be made for all costs involved—which may include items such as variable commissions, labour costs, marketing spend, loyalty program charges and more. Ensuring that these elements are understood, organised and tracked correctly is essential.

Utilise travel-intent data

Travel-intent data has become critical for developing a hotel’s revenue strategy. This data type uses search and booking data from thousands of online booking sites to help measure the demand a hotel can expect for future dates. Taking the insights from travel-intent data and layering it onto the traditional data sources used in forecasting provides hotels with one of the most profitable opportunities to predict which guests are most likely to book and deploy a tailored marketing strategy to target them.

A revenue culture breeds success

Revenue strategy involves more than technology that generates pricing decisions. It’s a business culture that must be instilled across an entire estate to help improve operational efficiency, increase asset value and attract and retain top industry talent. It is important that hotel executives recognise that a shift toward profit optimisation means they may also need to focus on strengthening their internal culture.

Moving revenue management beyond guest rooms into other organisational areas to increase total hotel profits requires having a robust revenue culture in place across all departments.

Today’s hotel leaders are tasked with converging the traditional roles of sales, marketing, meetings and events and revenue management with an inclusion of other departments like F&B, banquets and finance. While combining such diverse operational departments can appear complex, hoteliers should place particular focus on combining revenue management and marketing strategies.

This will allow a hotel to identify the factors attracting and driving potential guests to book directly with the hotel, as well as help determine the ideal price to bring in the most revenue at the lowest costs.

Focusing key hotel operational stakeholders around identifying, capturing and nurturing the most profitable business will create lucrative results. After all, when a revenue management culture becomes systemic and second nature within a hotel, all business revenue streams can be optimised, and entire property profits are maximised.

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Tracy Dong is the Lead Advisor, APAC, IDeaS Revenue Solutions / www.IDeaS.com